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A STUDY OF

HISTORY

The Royal Institute of International Affairs is
an unofficial and non-political body, founded in
1920 to encourage and facilitate the scientific
study of international questions.

The Institute, as such, is precluded by its rules
from expressing an opinion on any aspects of
international affairs ; opinions expressed in this
booh are, therefore, purely individual.

A STUDY OF

HISTORY

ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE

Director of Studies in the Royal Institute
of International Affairs
Research Professor of International History
in the University of London
(both on the Sir Daniel Stevenson Foundation )

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingid chariot hurrying near.

ANDREW MARVELL

voieiv rt 8 «t is yow yhapov.

THEOCRITUS: Kmlaxas ’Epars, 1. 7°

yrjpdonco 8 ' aiel iroAAo 8 t&ao>eo/i«vor.

SOLON

My times are in Thy hand.

Ps. xxxi. is, in the A.V.

But Thou art the same, and Thy
years shall have no end.

Ps. cii. 27 , in the A.V.

• 1

VOLUME VIII

Issued under the auspices of the
Royal Institute of International Affairs

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDONYORK TORONTO

1954

I-r >

: £ (Nev* r

Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4

GLASGOW HEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
BOK«»V CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI CATX TOWH IBADAN

Geoffrey Cumberlege, Publisher to the University

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

r.K '

..’»j . .. A\.

a oc. rc#. 2>Vo .

D &' '.

MX-

CONTENTS

/VIII. HEROIC AGES

■CT A. THE GENESIS OF A LIMES

* J B. A SOCIAL BARRAGE ....

’'l THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE
I' ‘The Wreckful Siege of Battering Days’

\The Impracticability of a Policy of Non-Intercoursc .

The Barbarians’ Exploitation of their Civilized Neighbours’ Weapons
The Barbarians’ Exploitation of their Native Terrain
J The Besieged Civilization’s Inability to Redress the Balance by Re-
course to Organization and Technique
The Barbarians’ Military Elusivencss and Economic Parasitism
The Self-Defeat of a Policy of Setting a Thief to Catch a Thief

D. THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
'j* A Reversal of Roles ......

The Demoralization of the Barbarian Conquerors
The Bankruptcy of a Fallen Ci%'ilized Empire’s Barbarian Successor-
States .......

The Restraining Influences of Aidfis, Nemesis, and Hilm
The Outbreak of an Invincible Criminality .

The DdbScle of an Ephemeral Barbarian Ascendancy

E. DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT .

I. A PHANTASY OF HEROISM

(

-i

U. A GENUINE HUMBLE SERVICE ....

IX. CONTACTS BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS
SPACE (encounters between contemporaries)
A. AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY

I. THE SELF-TRANSCENDENCE OF CIVILIZATIONS .

OF RELIGIONS IN MEBTINGPLACBS OP

II. BIRTHPLACES
CIVILIZATIONS

III. A CLASSIFICATION
CIVILIZATIONS

OF TYPES OF CONTACT BETWEEN

B. A SURVEY OF ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEM
PORARY CIVILIZATIONS

2 S
3i
39

106

I. A PLAN OF OPERATIONS ....

II. OPERATIONS ACCORDING TO PLAN

(fl) ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MODERN WESTERN CIVILIZATION
i. The Modem West and Russia .

Russia’s ‘Western Question’ .

Channels of Western Cultural Radiation into Russia

106

126

128

vi CONTENTS

Alternative Russian Responses to the Challenge of Western
Technology . . . . . .130

The Race between the West’s Technological Ad vance and Russia’s
Technological Westernization .... 136

The Soviet Union’s Encounter with the United States. . 141

2. The Modem West and the Main Body of Orthodox Christendom . 150
The Difference between the Ottoman Orthodox Christian and the

Muscovite Reaction to the West . . . .150

The Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christian Phobia of the West . 151

The Defeat of Cyril Loxikaris . . . . . 152

The Frustration of Evylnios Votilgharis . . . 160

The Revolution in the Ottoman Orthodox Christians’ Attitude
towards the West . . . . . .161

The Revolution in the West’s Attitude towards Orthodox
Christianity ...... 165

Channels of Western Cultural Penetration into an Ottoman
Orthodox Christendom ..... 168

The Reception of a Modern Western Culture by the Ottoman
Orthodox Christians and its Political Consequences . . 182

The Ottoman Millet System of Communal Autonomy. . 184

The Fiasco of the Phanariots’ 'Great Idea’ . . .187

The Disruption of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom by a

Modem Western Nationalism . . . .189

Russia’s Competition with the West for the Ex-Ottoman Orthodox
Christians’ Allegiance . . . . .192

3. The Modem West and the Hindu World . . .198

Likenesses and Differences in the Situations of a Hindu Society

under British Rule and an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom . 198

The Reception of a Modem Western Culture and its Political
Consequences ...... 200

The Gulf between a Hindu and a Post-Christian Western

Weltanschauung ...... 205

The Aloofness of a Reformed British Civil Service in India . 207
The Unsolved Problem of a Rising Pressure of Population . 213

4. The Modem West and the Islamic World . . .216

The Encirclement of the Islamic World by the West, Russia, and

Tibet . . . . . . .216

The Postponement of the Crisis .... 219

The Muslim Peoples’ Military Approach to the Western Question 232
The Salvaging of an Ottoman Society by Selim III, Mehmed
'All, and Mahm&d II . . . . 239

The Collapse in Turkey and Egypt at the Beginning of the Last
Quarter of the Nineteenth Century .... 249

The Failure of the Arabs to Respond to a Continuing Challenge
of Western Aggression ..... 257

The Failure of a Turkish Committee of Union and Progress to
Maintain the Ottoman Empire . . . .261

The Success of Mustafi KernSl Atattirk in Creating a Turkish
National State ...... 263

Russia’s Competition with the West for an Ascendancy over the
Islamic World ...... 268

CONTENTS vii

5. The Modern West and the fetes . . . .272

The Peculiarities of the Western Province of a Jewish Diaspora’s

Domain ....... 272

The Persecution of the Peninsular Jews under a Visigothic
Catholic Christian Regime ..... 277

The Respite for the Peninsular Jews under Andalusian and
Ottoman Muslim Regimes ..... 280

The Causes of the Western Christians’ Ill-treatment of the Jews 281
The Plot of the Jewish Tragedy in a Western Christendom . 285
A Mirage of Enfranchisement. . . . .286

The Fate of the European Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, A.D.

1933-48 . . . . . . .288

Causes of the Failure of Enfranchisement . . . 292

Inherent Consequences of the Captivation of the Jews by a
Modem Western Gentile Nationalism . . . 295

Inherent Consequences of Zionism’s Departure from a Tradi¬
tional Jewish Practice of Political Quietism . . . 298

The Effects of the First World War on the Destiny of Palestine 301
Great Britain’s Responsibility for the Catastrophe in Palestine . 303
Germany’s and the United States’ Responsibility for the Catas¬
trophe in Palestine ...... 306

The Retrospect and the Outlook .... 309

6. The Modern West and the Far Eastern and Indigenous American

Civilizations . . . . . . 313

The Perils of Ignorance . . . . - 3*3

The Fate and Future of the Indigenous American Civilizations 315
Chinese and Japanese Reactions to the Impact of an Early Modem
West . . . . . . .316

Chinese and Japanese Reactions to the Impact of a Late Modem

West . . . . . . .324

The Unsolved Problem of a Rising Pressure of Population . 330

A Communist Russia’s Chinese Fifth Column. . . 334

7. Characteristics of the Encounters bctioeen the Modem West and its

Contemporaries up to Date ..... 337

(6) ENCOUNTERS WITH MEDIEVAL WESTERN CHRISTENDOM . . 346

x. The Flow and Ebb of the Crusades .... 346

2. The Medieval West and the Syriac World . . . 363

3. The Medieval West and Greek Orthodox Christendom . 375

4. The Medieval West and Kievan Russia . . . 398

x. Encounters with the Post-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization . 403
Likenesses and Differences between the Post-Alexandrine Hel¬
lenic and the Modem Western Eruption . . . 403

The Flow and Ebb of Post-Alexandrine Hellenism . . 407

The Epiphany of Higher Religions . . . .416

2. Encounters with the Pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization . 418
The Hellenic Society’s Offensive in the Mediterranean Basin . 418
The Syriac Society’s Political Consolidation for Self-Defence . 423
The Achaemenian Empire’s Counter-Offensive . . 430

viii CONTENTS

The Aftermath on the Political Plane .... 435

The Aftermath on the Cultural Plane .... 437

3. Encounters with the Syriac Civilization . . . 439

4. Encounters with the Egyptiac Civilization in the Age of 'the New

Empire’ ....... 447

5. Tares and Wheat . . . . . - 45 *

C. THE DRAMA OF ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CON¬

TEMPORARIES (STRUCTURE, CHARACTERS, AND

PLOT). 454

I. CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS .... 454

n. ROLBS, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS . . .464

(a) AGENTS AND REAGENTS ...... 464

( b ) ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE REACTIONS ..... 466

D. THE PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEP¬

TION .4S1

I. THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE ..... 481

II. THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE . . . . -495

Culture-Patterns and their Instability .... 495

The Conduciveness of Cultural Disintegration to Cultural Inter¬
course ....... 501

Decomposition through Diffraction .... 508

Inverse Selection through Transmission . . . 514

E. THE CONSEQUENCES OF ENCOUNTERS BE¬

TWEEN CONTEMPORARIES . . . .522

I. AFTERMATHS OF UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS . . . 522

(а) EFFECTS ON THE FORTUNES OF THE ASSAULTED PARTY . . 522

(б) EFFECTS ON THE FORTUNES OF THE ASSAILANT . . . 527

II. AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS . . . 529

(а) EFFECTS ON THE BODY SOCIAL ..... 529

x. Symptoms in the Social Life of the Assailant . . . 529

2. Symptoms in the Social Life of the Assaulted Party . . 530

(a) 'One Man’s Meat is Another Man’s Poison’ . . 530

( 0 ) 'One Thing Leads to Another’ .... 542

(б) RESPONSES OF THE SOUL ..... 564

x. Dehumanization ...... 564

2. Zealotism and Hcrodianism ..... 580

A Pair of Polar Standpoints ..... 580
A Survey of Zealot and Hcrodian Reactions . . . 584

A Meeting of Extremes ..... 610
The Ineffectiveness of the Zcalot-Herodian Response . . 621

3. Evangelism ....... 623

ANNEXES

CONTENTS

VIII C, Annex: The Temporary Halt of the Western Civilization’s Frontier

in North America at the Edge of the Great Plains . 630
D, Annex: ‘The Monstrous Regiment of Women’ . . . 651

E (1), Annex: Optical Illusions in Hesiod’s Vista of History . 664

IX B (1), Annex : The Relativity of the Unit of Classification to the Object

of Study . . . . . .667

B (n) (a) 1, Annex I: The Role of Technological Competition in the

Westernization of Russia . . . 674

B (tl) (a) 1, Annex II: The Byzantine Inspiration of the Russian
Political Ethos

B (11) (a) 2, Annex I: The Conflict of Cultures in the Soul of Solomd
B (n) (a) 2, Annex II: The Morea on the Eve of the Uprising of a.d
1821 ....

B (11) (a) 3, Annex I: The Peasant Majority of Mankind and th
Agrarian Policy of the Soviet Union
B (n) (a) 3, Annex II: Some Historical Clues to the Riddle of Paki
stan's Future .

B (11) (a) 4, Annex I: The Ineffectiveness of Panislamism
B (11) (a) 4, Annex II: The Exploitation of Egypt by Mehmed 'Ali
B (ll) (a) 5, Annex: Jewish History and the Millet Idea, by Jamc
Parkes ....

B (11) (a) 7, Annex: The Weltanschauung of Alexander Herzen
B (ix) (e) 2, Annex: Sicilian Light on Roman Origins
C (1), Annex: ‘Asia’ and 'Europe’: Facts and Fantasies
D (11), Annex: The Mercenary Soldier’s Role as a Cultural Spearhead

TABLE

Barbarian War-Bands

734-5

zzs & S

O & ~ O O' B O » - >0 O'

VIII

HEROIC AGES

A. THE GENESIS OF A LIMES

I N the two preceding Parts of this Study we have been concerned with
universal states established by would-be saviours arising in the
Dominant Minority 1 and with universal churches created by the Internal
Proletariat . 1 Our subject in the present Part is the character of the so-
called ‘heroic ages’ that arc episodes in the brief lives of barbarian
war-bands.

In another context 3 we have already acquainted ourselves with the
conditions under which such ‘heroic ages’ arc generated. We have seen
how, when a growing civilization breaks down through the deterioration
of an attractively creative into an odiously dominant minority, one of the
effects of this sinister change in the broken-down society’s leadership is
the estrangement of its former proselytes in the once primitive societies
round about, which the civilization in its growth stage was influenc¬
ing in divers degrees by the effect of its cultural radiation. The ex¬
proselytes’ attitude changes from an admiration expressing itself in
mimesis to a hostility breaking out into warfare; and we have seen 4 that
this warfare between a disintegrating civilization and its alienated ex¬
ternal proletariat may have one or other of two alternative outcomes.

On a front on which the local terrain offers the aggressive civilization
the possibility of advancing, at the militant barbarians’ expense, up to
a ‘natural frontier' in the shape of some unnavigated sea or untraversed
desert or unsurmounted mountain range, the barbarians, thus caught in
a confined space and compelled to fight with their backs to the wall, may be
decisively subjugated or annihilated. But, on fronts where the accidents
of the terrain do not thus conspire with the prowess and policy of the
civilization to bring a definitive victory within its grasp, geography is
apt to militate in the barbarians’ favour; for, where the retreating bar¬
barian has open to him, in his rear, an unlimited field of manoeuvre, the
shifting battle front is bound, sooner or later, to arrive at a line at which
the aggressive civilization’s military superiority—however great this may
have been initially, and however much it may have been increased
through the dearly purchased experience of fratricidal warfare 5 —will be
neutralized at last by the increasing handicap of the ever lengthening
distance of the front from the aggressor’s base of operations.

Along this line, when it is reached, a war of movement will change
into a static war without having resulted in any military decision; and,
since both belligerents will still be in the field, the Dominant Minority
and the External Proletariat will find themselves at this stage in stationary
positions in which they will be living side by side, as the former creative

« Part vr. * Pm VII. » In V. v. 194-210.

4 In V. v. 203-8. * Sec III. iii. 130-1.

B 2698 . vm B

2 HEROIC AGES

minority and its prospective proselytes were living before the breakdown
of the civilization set them at variance with one another. This semblance
of a return to a happier previous situation is, however, superficial; for,
though the military front has now become stationary', the psychological
relation between the parties on either side of it has not reverted from a
barren mutual hostility' to the previous creative interplay of attraction
and mimesis, and there has been no restoration, cither, of the geographi¬
cal conditions under which this cultural intercourse once took place. In
its growth stage the civilization gradually shaded off into a surrounding
barbarism across a broad threshold which offered the outsider an easy
access to an inviting vista within. The change from friendship to hostility
transformed this conductive cultural threshold ( limen ) into an insulating
military front; and the stabilization of this front, so far from mitigating its
sharpness, turns out to have severely accentuated it. The fluid front of a
running warfare is neither so definite nor so impassable a barrier as is
the military frontier (limes) into which the fluid front crystallizes when the
stage of stationary warfare is reached . 1 The contrast in configuration
and character between an original limen -zone and an eventual /jww-line
is the geographical expression of the conditions that generate an heroic
age.

An heroic age is, in fact, the social and psychological consequence of the
crystallization of a limes, and our purpose in this Part is to trace this
sequence of events by our customary empirical method of investigation.
A necessary background to this undertaking is, of course, a survey of
the barbarian war-bands that had breasted divers sectors of the limites of
divers universal states during the history of Man in Process of Civiliza¬
tion up to date. A survey of this kind has already been attempted in a
previous Part . 1 In that place a considerable muster of barbarian w r ar-
bands has been reviewed, and, in passing, we have also there taken note
of their distinctive achievements in the two fields of sectarian religion
and epic poetry. In our present inquiry this foregoing survey can be
drawn upon for purposes of illustration without having to be recapi¬
tulated.

1 See V. v. 208. Ibn Khaldun define* the frontier of an empire as the line at which the
imperial government’s authority peters out. ‘A dynasty is much more powerful at it*
seat of government than it is at the extremities of its empire.’ He compares the loss of
energy in the radiation of its power to the gradual dying away of rays of light streaming
out from some central point, or of the circular ripples which spread over the surface
of a piece of water when one strikes it ( Muqaddamdt , translated by de Slane, Baron McG.
(Pans 1863-8, Imprimerie Imp6rialc, 3 vols.), vol. 1, p. 332).

* In V. v. 210-337.

B. A SOCIAL BARRAGE

I F the cultural limen of a growing civilization is aptly described as the
hospitable threshold of an ever open door, the military limes of a dis¬
integrating civilization can no less aptly be likened to a forbidding
barrage astride a no longer open valley. A threshold is an unassuming
piece of work, in which the human architect has been content to take
advantage of a suitable surface and gradient that have been provided
for him by Nature; a barrage is the imposing monument of a human
skill and power that have set Nature at defiance; yet the magnificent
barrage is as precarious as the humble threshold is secure; for the
defiance of Nature is a tour de force on which Man cannot venture with
impunity.

‘The Arab-Muslim tradition relates that once upon a time there was
to be seen in the Yaman a colossal work of hydraulic engineering known
as the dam or dyke of Ma’rib, where the waters descending from the east¬
ern mountains of the Yaman collected in an immense reservoir and thence
irrigated a great tract of country, giving life to an intensive system of
cultivation and thereby supporting a dense population. After a time, the
tradition goes on to relate, this dam broke, and in breaking devastated
everything and cast the inhabitants of the country into a state of such
dire distress that many tribes were compelled to emigrate.’•

In the Islamic historical tradition this story—true or legendary—of
the literal building and breaking of a barrage has served to account for
the initial impulse behind an Arab Volkerwanderung that eventually
swept out of the Arabian Peninsula with an impetus which carried it
across the Tien Shan and the Pyrenees. Translated from this literal
rendering into a simile, it becomes the story of every limes of every
universal state.

‘With the internal condition of the exterior barbarians the [sovereign
of the universal state] has no concern; but the barrier or pale, whether
of masonry or of armed men, obviously exerts a pressure of its own. It
acts effectively as a dam against which weight accumulates, and so creates
a point of pressure for those outside. In the end the barrier breaks, and
with the inundation a new situation is created in which new tribal units
are broken up, new individuals awake to self-assertion, and a new re¬
distribution of ownership takes place .’ 1

Is this social catastrophe of the bursting of a military dam an inevi¬
table tragedy or an avoidable one ? If we arc to find the answer to this
insistent question, we must analyse the social and psychological effects
of the military barrage-builder's imperious interference with the
natural course of relations between a civilization and its external prole¬
tariat.

The first effect of erecting a barrage is, of course, to create a reservoir

1 Caetani, L.: Studi di Storia Orientate, vol. i (Milan iqi r, Hoepli), p. 266.

1 Tcggart, F. J.: The Procases of History (New Haven, Conn. 1918, Yale Univeraity
Prew), pp. 97-98.

HEROIC AGES

E stream above this artificial obstruction to the normal drainage down
valley bottom; and this effect is inexorable even if we can imagine it
to have been unintended and unforeseen. The erection of the barrage
thus produces a striking differentiation in the physiography of the drain¬
age basin which was non-existent in the antecedent state of Nature. The
intervention of the barrage now transforms the valley immediately
above it from dry land into a lake with an area that is determined by the
height of the barrage’s brim. Up to this level the now pent-up waters
of the catchment basin will fill the upper portion of the valley and its
lateral ravines, but the resultant reservoir, at its maximum, will have
only a limited extent. It can never cover more than a fraction even of its
own catchment basin, since it is beyond the builder’s power to raise a
barrage, sited far down the valley, to the altitude of the head waters of
the downflowing streams; and, even if these waters could have been
dammed back right up to their head, there would still have remained a
vast unsubmerged hinterland. This new and sharp distinction between
a now submerged tract immediately above the barrage and a region at
the back of beyond which is still left high and dry has already come to
our notice in the social application of our hydrographic simile.

In a previous context 1 we have observed the contrast between the
revolutionary effect of a limes on the life of barbarians within point-
blank range of it and the undisturbed torpidity of primitive peoples in a
more distant hinterland. The Hypcrboracan Slavs continued placidly to
lead their primitive life in the secluded Pripct Marshes throughout the
span of two millennia which first saw the Achaean barbarians convulsed
by their proximity to the European land-frontier of 'the thalassocracy of
Minos’ in the basin of the Aegean Sea, and then saw the Teuton barbar¬
ians going through the same experience in their turn, some eighteen
hundred years later, as a result of their proximity to the European land-
frontier which the Roman Empire drew across the breadth of the
Continent between the North Sea and the Black Sea . 2 The Achaeans and
the Teutons were convulsed because they each happened to be en¬
gulfed in a reservoir created by the erection of a limes ; the Slavs remained
undisturbed because, on both occasions, their physically water-logged
habitat happened to be left culturally high and dry . 3

1 In II. ii. 315-22.

J The weakness of this frontier, owing to its inordinate length, has been pointed out
in V. v. 591-5. _

3 This illuminating conception of the contrast between a social ‘reservoir’, whose
barbarian denizens are decisively affected by the proximity of the limes that has dammed
back the waters of life, and a more distant hinterland, whose barbarian denizens remain
‘unregeneratc’ because the social influence of the limes is ineffective at that longer
range, was first expounded by Owen Lattimore in Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict (New
York 1932, Macmillan), pp. 36-42. The particular instance that gave Lattimore his in¬
sight into this generic feature in the human geography of limites was the classic case of
the Great Wall of China, and the particular stage in the cycle of frontier history at
which he first observed and recorded the phenomenon is one at which the 'reservoir 1
is no longer the undesired menace that it is in the estimation of the /irnei-building
Imperial Power, but has become the invaluable arcanum imperii of a barbarian successor-
state of the empire for whose defence the limes was originally constructed.

The barbarian war-lord from a ‘reservoir’ area who has succeeded in breaking through
a limes and usurping Caesar’s throne finds himself beset by two anxieties: the conquered
ex-subjects of the overthrown universal state may revolt against their parvenu bar¬
barian masters; and the 'unregeneratc’ barbarians in the more distant hinterland on the

A SOCIAL BARRAGE 5

Why arc the barbarians in the ‘reservoir’ area so disturbingly affected
by the proximity of a military frontier which is at the same time a cultural
barrage ? And what is the source of a subsequent access of energy which
has enabled them invariably to break through the limes sooner or later as a
matter of historical fact, whether this break-through is inevitable or is
avoidable as a matter of theory? We may find answers to these questions
if we follow out our simile in terms of its local Sinic geographical setting.

Let us suppose the imaginary dam that symbolizes a limes in our
simile to have been built astride some high valley in the region actually
traversed by the Great Wall within the latter-day Chinese provinces of
Shensi and Shansi. What is the ultimate source of that formidable body
of water that we see pressing, in ever increasing volume, upon the dam’s
up-stream face ? Though this water must all manifestly have come down¬
stream from above the dam on the last stage of its journey, the ultimate
source of the greater part of it cannot lie in this direction; for the distance
between the dam and the headwaters is not very great, and beyond the
headwaters there stretches away the boundless Mongolian Plateau, with
a dry steppe on its rim and a drier desert at its heart. If this parched
region above the dam had been the sole source of the reservoir’s water-
supply, the present head of water could never have accumulated; and we
know, as a matter of fact, that the main source of supply is to be found,
not above the dam, but below it: not on the Mongolian Plateau but in
the Pacific Ocean.

We also know that water cannot perform the salmon’s feat of forcing
a passage upstream and vaulting over a weir; and this means that not one
drop of the copious supply that has nevertheless succeeded in making its
way out of the Pacific into the reservoir can have travelled over the
ground in liquid form. In order to rise from sea level to the reservoir’s
altitude this water must have been transformed by the heat of the Sun
from liquid into vapour, been spirited by an east wind over plain and
mountain in a volatile cloud, and then been condensed by cold air into
rain falling into the catchment basin. Through thus first losing its
liquidity and then regaining it, the migrant water deftly turns an adverse

farther side of 'the reservoir' may be tempted by the ease and brilliance of the 'reser¬
voir' barbarians’ success to emulate their achievement by pouring through the breach
at their heels and trying to snatch a share in the spoils of a derelict world. In these cir¬
cumstances the ruler of a barbarian successor-state in partibus civilium is confronted
with the dual task of keeping 'unregenerate' barbarian competitors out and keeping
restive civilized subjects down. For both purposes he relies on the military man-power
of his comrades who have stayed behind in the reservoir instead of following him through
the breach; and these intact reserves of an invading war-band are admirably fitted for
performing both duties, since they have retained enough of their pristine barbarian
military virtue to be more than a match for a civilized subject population, while they have
acquired a sufficient tincture of the culture of their civilized neighbours and subjects
to dc more than a match for their ‘unregenerate’ barbarian neighbours and rivals.

In Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York 1940, American Geographical Society),
pp. 247-5 J, Lattimore has developed this concept of a 'reservoir' zone abutting on the
outer face of a limes by showing that there is a corresponding zone in the rear of a limes
in which a sub-society' of frontiersmen differentiates itself, under the influence of the
immediate proximity of the barbarians, from the main body of the civilization which
the limes both protects and confines. The frontiersmen of the marches and the bar¬
barians of the ’reservoir’ zone tend to approximate culturally to one another and
eventually to fraternize against both the civilized population of the interior and the
‘unregenerate’ barbarians in the outer darkness beyond the farther limits of the reservoir.
(On this point, sec also the present Study, V. v. 459-80, and pp. 14-15, below).

6 HEROIC AGES

law of gravity to its own advantage; but, like human migrants who take
advantage of an estranging sea by temporarily transforming themselves
from landlubbers into seamen, the water has to pay a price for its
ingeniously contrived passage. The cultural elements of their social
heritage that the seafarers take with them on board ship prove to have
suffered ‘a sea change’ by the time when they are landed in the emigrants’
new overseas place of settlement;' and the physical elements with which
the flying water is impregnated suffer a comparable ‘sky change’ as a
result of their journey. The tincture of sea salt is left behind in the process
of evaporation which starts the flying water on its travels, and a tincture
of rock salt is acquired when the streams begotten by the precipitated
rain scour out the ravines in their descent into the reservoir.

The water has accomplished its miraculous aerial voyage, but it is
now a different brew from what it originally was; and this physical
phenomenon is an accurate and illuminating simile of the psychic
phenomenon of the filling of the reservoir of barbarian energy, dammed
back by a military limes, with the water of life that psychologists call
libido. The psychic energy that accumulates in the reservoir till its
remorseless mounting pressure eventually bursts the barrage is derived
only in an inconsiderable measure from the transfrontier barbarians’
own exiguous primitive social heritage; the bulk of it is drawn from the
vast stores of the civilization which the barrage has been built to protect.
This is the source of supply that swells the head of water in the reservoir
to a mass that eventually proves too much for the barrage’s powers of
resistance; and it is one of the ironies of History that the water which
then pours through the breach should originally have been supplied by
the very region which the cataclysm now devastates. Why has this
water returned in a sudden destructive flood and not in a perennial
fertilizing stream? The answer is to be found partly in the erection of
the limes barrage, which has been an audacious human act of inter¬
ference with the ordinary course of Nature, and partly in the trans¬
formation which the migrant psychic energy has undergone in the
course of its journey from the cultivated world within the limes to the
barbarian reservoir beyond it—a transformation that has been Nature’s
device for surmounting an obstacle which Man has placed in her path.

Some such transformation of psychic energy is, no doubt, the price of
every transfer of culture from one society to another; but the degree and
the character of the transformation vary with the circumstances in which
the transfer takes place. 2 The psychic transformation is at its minimum
when the society that is the transmitting agent is a civilization in process
of growth and the receiving reagent is a primitive society in a socially
static Yin-state; it is at its maximum when both parties are civilizations
and both are in disintegration. The case with which we are concerned in
this Part manifestly lies somewhere between these two extremes; for a
civilization which is transmitting psychic energy to its external proletariat
is a civilization that is in process of disintegration ex hypothesi, while
on the other hand the barbarians in ‘the reservoir’ beyond the limes are
ex-primitives whose psychic resistance to the cultural radiation of the
1 See II. ii. 84-100. * See pp. 481-629, below.

A SOCIAL BARRAGE 7

adjoining civilization is prompted, not by the positive motive of being
up in arms in defence of an alternative civilization of their own, but only
by the negative motive of hostility to an alien culture which, in its break¬
down, has lost the original savour that once made it attractive to the
estranged barbarians’ proselyte ancestors.

How is a transformation of psychic energy brought about in any of
these diverse degrees ? The transforming process is the decomposition
of a culture and its recomposition in a new pattern in which the constant
component elements will have entered into new relations with one
another, even if none of the original elements have been eliminated and
no fresh elements have been added. In other contexts 1 we have com¬
pared the social radiation of culture to the physical radiation of light,
and we shall be reverting to this simile and working out some of its impli¬
cations in the next Part after this, 2 in which we shall be concerned with
encounters in which all parties are societies of the species here called
'civilizations’. In this place we need merely remind ourselves of three
radiational 'laws’.

The first law is that an integral culture ray, like an integral light ray,
is diffracted into a spectrum of its component elements in the course of
penetrating a recalcitrant object—the degree of this diffraction being
proportionate to the degree of the resistance that is encountered.

The second law is that the diffraction of a culture may also occur, with¬
out any impact on an alien and recalcitrant body social, and indeed at a
stage before the emission of the migrant ray by the emitting society, if,
before the time of emission, this society has already broken down and
begun to disintegrate. The cohesion and the diffraction of the component
elements of a culture are, in fact, the respective symptoms of social health
and growth and of social sickness and disintegration. A growing civiliza¬
tion can be defined as one in which the components of its culture—an
economic clement, a political element, and a third which may be called
the cultural element par excellence—are in harmony with one another;
and, on the same principle, a disintegrating civilization can be defined
as one in which these same elements have fallen into discord.

Our third law is that the velocity and the penetrative power of an
integral culture ray arc averages of the diverse velocities and penetra¬
tive powers which its economic, political, and cultural components
respectively display when, as a result of diffraction, they each travel
independently of the others. In isolation the economic ray is the swiftest
and most penetrating, the political ray comes next to it in degree, while
the cultural ray is surpassed by both its companions on both criteria.
The speed and penetrative power of an isolated political ray, as well as
those of an isolated economic ray, arc higher than those of an integral
ray, whereas the speed and penetrative power of an isolated cultural
ray are lower than those of an integral ray in which it is borne on the
wings of its two sisters. This is one reason why the diffraction of a culture
ray is a social disaster; for the social values of the three elements, as we
find when we assess them, are exactly inverse to their capacities for
covering distance and for making their way into foreign bodies.

» In III. iii. 151-2 and V. v. 199-201. 1 On pp. 481-629, b<!ow.

8 HEROIC AGES

In the social intercourse between a disintegrating civilization and its
alienated external proletariat across a military limes, the diffracted radia¬
tion of the civilization suffers a woeful impoverishment in the course of
its arduous journey; for the respective states of the two parties conspire
with the artificial barrier between them virtually to eliminate all rela¬
tions except those of war and trade, and, of these two, it is war that plays
the predominant role. 1

It is true that the passage of a barbarian personnel through the limes
into the civilization’s domain, first as prisoners of war, then as hostages,
next as mercenaries, and finally as conquerors, 2 is reflected on the econo¬
mic plane in a counter-flow of money—through the diverse channels of
loot, military pay, and subsidies—out of the world within the limes into
the barbarian ‘reservoir’ outside; and this money eventually flows back
to its source in payment for goods purchased by its barbarian recipients
from marchmen-mcrchants who venture out beyond the limes to peddle
the wares of Civilization. There have been situations in w-hich a com¬
munity of transfronticr barbarians has come in this way to play an
appreciable part in the domestic economy of the society on which they
have been preying. A classic example is the apparent economic effect of
the subsidies paid by the Constantinopolitan Roman Imperial Govern¬
ment to Attila {dominabatur , a.d. 434-53), the war-lord of a confederacy
of Hun Nomad war-bands cantoned in the Hungarian Alfold. This remit¬
tance of money in specie from the Imperial Treasury at Constantinople
to Attila’s ordu beyond the limes seems to have operated as a roundabout
way of transferring purchasing power from the agrarian interests in the
Empire, whose taxes provided the means of payment, to the manufactur¬
ing and commercial interests, which earned profits by making and
marketing goods for purchase by the Huns with the money that they
had exacted. 3 This commercial intercourse across a military limes is,
however, apt to be discouraged and restricted by the imperial authorities
because the manifest profitableness of the transfrontier trade to the
traders on both sides is a plain and pointed indication that, in the social
situation created by the erection of a limes, the marchmen just inside
the barrage may acquire a common interest with the barbarians just
outside it in the exploitation of the marchmen’s fellow citizens in the
interior of the world which the limes is intended to protect; and, since a
common interest might assert itself in concerted action between march-
men and barbarians which would be a deadly danger to the fenced-in
civilization,

‘an imperial boundary . .. has in fact a double function: it serves not only
to keep the outsiders from getting in but to prevent the insiders from
getting out.. . It was necessary to restrict Chinese enterprise beyond the
Great Wall . . . because Chinese who ventured too far beyond the Great
Wall became a liability to the state; the business in which they engaged,

1 See V. v. 202-3 ar| d 208-9.

* See V. v. 459-60, and Chadwick, H. M.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1012, Uni¬
versity Pres*), pp. 445 ~ 6 -

J An illuminating and entertaining analysis of this three-comcrcd economic relation¬
ship will be found in Thompson, E. A.: A History of Attila and the Hunt (Oxford 1048.
Clarendon Press), pp. 184-97.

A SOCIAL BARRAGE 9

whether farming or trade, contributed more to the barbarian community
than it did to the Chinese community. They passed out of the Chinese
orbit . . . [and] Chinese who left the Chinese orbit and accommodated
themselves to an un-Chinese economic and social order inevitably began
cither to adhere to barbarian rulers or to practise barbarian forms of rule
themselves—to the disadvantage of China.’ 1

These considerations move an imperial government to restrict the
«ow of trade between their own marchmcn and the transfrontier bar¬
barians; and such trade as there is tends to confine itself to an exchange
of imperial specie in barbarian hands for two classes of imperial products:
luxuries for the barbarian war-lords and their lieutenants and weapons
both for them and for the rank-and-file of their followers. 1 The trade
across the limes is, in fact, sickly as well as precarious, while border
warfare flourishes perennially because Mars is master of the situation in
which a disintegrating civilization and an alienated external proletariat
face one another across a static military frontier.

Under these sinister auspices, such selective mimesis of the Dominant
Minority by the External Proletariat as does occur takes place on the
barbarians’ initiative because the barbarians are politically free.

'The needs and motives of the cisfrontier society and state must make
concessions to those of the transfronticr peoples. The very act of drawing
a boundary is an acknowledgement that the peoples excluded are not
under control and cannot be ruled by command.’ 1

The barbarians show their initiative by transmuting those culture
elements that they do accept from the cisfrontier civilization. The lines
which this transmutation follows are determined partly by an hostility
to the transmitting civilization which makes the barbarian recipients of
its cultural radiation disinclined to adopt what they borrow in a form
that would stamp it as being a loan from this distasteful source; but this
negative motive of aversion is reinforced by a positive incentive to turn
a loan to practical account by adapting it to suit the needs of local
barbarian life in ‘the reservoir’.

The adaptations thus prompted by xenophobia and by utilitarianism
go to different lengths in different fields of activity. The cultural products
of a psychic energy flowing into a transfronticr barbarian society out of a
civilization within the limes are modified in the process in some cases
only to an extent that docs not wholly disguise their exotic origin, while

* Lattimore, O.: Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York 1940, American Geo¬
graphical Society), pp. 240 and 242. See also Thompson, op. cit., pp. 174-6, and the
present Study, V. v. 471-6.

1 Classic instances are the Roman weapons of the Imperial Age that have been found
by Modem Western archaeologists in graves and hoards in the North European hinter¬
land of the Continental European Roman frontier, and the Greek luxury goods (some
of them manufactured especially to suit the taste of this particular barbarian market)
thae have been found in tombs of the Scythian Age in the Great Western Bay of the
Eurasian Steppe. In the social structure of the Hun Power in the Hungarian Alffild in
Attila’s day the importation of luxuiy goods was as important from the political point
of view as the importation of arms from the military” for the effectiveness of Attila’s
authority depended on the loyalty of his lieutenants, and his ability to retain their
loyalty was dependent, in its turn, on his being able to put them in possession of
luxuries which were symbols of wealth and honour in Nomad eyes (see Thompson,
op. cit., especially pp. 170-1 and 176-7).

J Lattimore, op. cit., p. 243.

HEROIC AGES
in other cases the transmutation goes so far as to be equivalent to an
original act of creation through which the barbarians make the borrowed
psychic raw materials completely their own spiritual property. Examples
both of recognizable adaptations and of virtually new creations have
been given already in a previous survey which need not be recapitulated.
In this place we need only remind ourselves that the ‘reservoir’ barbar¬
ians arc apt to borrow the higher religion of an adjoining civilization in
the form of a heresy 1 and the Caesarism of an adjoining universal state
in the form of ‘an irresponsible type of kingship, resting not upon tribal
or national law . .. but upon military prestige,’ ... in which ‘the king
and his comitatns form the nucleus of the organism’, 2 while the barbar¬
ians’ capacity for original creation is displayed in heroic poetry 3 and in
a pantheon that is the Olympian counterpart of the human comitatus of
a barbarian war-lord. 4

These creative achievements of a barbarian society beyond the pale
of a disintegrating civilization are impressive; yet the cunningly re¬
minted metal still bears a tell-tale mark of its alien origin. The cultural

« See V. v. 227-9, for the Arianism of the East Teuton barbarian convert* to Christi¬
anity beyond the Continental European frontier of the Roman Empire; p. 230 for the
distinctive ecclesiastical practices of the Celtic barbarian converts to Christianity in
the British Isles; p. 230 for the original presentation of Islam as a special revelation of the
truths of Judaism and Christianity for the benefit of the Arab barbarians beyond the

S 'rian frontier of the Roman Empire; p. 250 for the adoption of Manichaeism and
estorian Christianity by the barbarians beyond the pale of the Syriac World in Central
Asia; pp. 251-2 for the hold won by the heretical Shi'i version of Islam over the Berber,
Iranian, and Arab barbarian neighbours of the 'Abbasid Caliphate in North-West Africa,
in the fastnesses between the Elburz Range and the south coast of the Caspian Sea,
and in HasS; p. 295 for the conversion of the Bosniak barbarians first to Bogomilism
and then to Islam in preference either to Eastern Orthodox or to Western Catholic
Christianity: p. 205 for the Bektashism of the Albanian barbarian converts to Islam on
the fringe of the Ottoman Empire; and pp. 295-6 for the dissident Islamic Puritanism
of the Wahhabi, Idrisi, Mahdist, and Sanusi Arab barbarians adjoining the frontiers
of the Ottoman Empire in Arabia, the Eastern Sudan, and the hinterland of Cyrenaica.

* Chadwick, op. cit., pp. 391 and 377; compare eundem: The Origin 0/ the English
Nation (Cambridge 1007, University Press), pp. 295-300. See also the present Study,
V. vi. 4, n. 4, and 228-34.

J Sec V. v. 233 and 237-8 for the Homeric Epic of the Achaean barbarians beyond
the Continental European frontier of ‘the thalassocracy of Minos’; p. 233 for the Saga
of the Scandinavian barbarian neighbours of an infant Western Christendom; p. 233
for the Epic of the Teuton barbarians beyond the Continental frontiers of the Roman
Empire; pp. 233-4 and 265 (together with V. y. 596-606) for the Epic of the Aryas
beyond the north-eastern frontiers of the Sumcric Empire of the Four Quarters and the
north-western frontiers of the domain of the Indus Culture; p. 234 for the heroic poetry
of the Arab barbarians beyond the Syrian frontier of the Roman Empire and the
Jritji frontier of the Sasanian Empire; pp. 253-8 for the Greek Epic of the East Roman
Akritai beyond the Anatolian frontier of the 'Abbasid Caliphate; pp. 250-60 for the
French Epic of the Frank barbarians beyond the Pyrcnaean frontier of the Umayyad
Caliphate in the Iberian Peninsula; pp. 288-9 for the Epic of the Russian barbarians
beyond the north-west frontier of the Golden Horde; pp. 296-0 for the Greek and Serb
heroic poetry of barbarians on the European fringes of the Ottoman Empire; p. 310
for the heroic poetry of the Mongol barbarians beyond the Central Asian frontiers of
the Ming and Manchu Empires; p. 325 for the heroic poetry of the Bosniak barbarians
beyond the south-east frontier of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy.

4 See V. v. 230-3 for barbarian pantheons in general; p. 232 for the pantheons of the
Achaeans, the Scandinavians, and the Aryas; p. 233 for the pantheon of the continental
Teuton barbarians beyond the European frontiers of the Roman Empire; and pp.
328-32 for the religious teaching of the prophets who arose, in the eighteenth and nine¬
teenth centuries of the Christian Era, among North American Indians whose traditional
way of life was being destroyed by the impact of invaders from the European side of
the Atlantic. These American Indian barbarian religions were noteworthy, as we have
observed, in being gospels of non-violence in response to the aggression of the Indiana’
European assailants.

A SOCIAL BARRAGE u

products of the transfrontier barbarian arc scarred by that ‘schism in the
soul’ which the malady of social disintegration brings with it as its
counterpart and concomitant. 1 In the psychological revolution which
coins Barbarism out of Primitive Human Nature, the traditional har¬
mony of Primitive Life in its static Yin-state is disrupted into a tension
between the two poles of a more sophisticated individualism and a like¬
wise more sophisticated sense of unity.

« Sec V. v. 376-368 and vi. x—x 68.

C. THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE
'The Wreckful Siege of Battering Days'

T HE limen that lies open between the domain of a growing civilization
and the homelands of its barbarian proselytes is like a gentle tree-
clad slope on which the roots preserve the soil from erosion, so that the
descending waters seep through gradually without scouring out gullies
and pouring down them in torrents. This landscape is weather-proof,
and it is consequently an insurance against a cataclysm so long as it is
not convulsed through the civilization’s breaking down. By contrast, a
static military frontier between a disintegrating civilization and its
alienated external proletariat is intrinsically impermanent. The barrage
is doomed to burst sooner or later. Premonitions of its ultimate fate are
to be found in the avalanches of barbarian counter-invasion which are
apt to descend on a civilization in the course of its history, before the
establishment of its universal state, on fronts where its representatives
have first extended its bounds by force at the adjoining barbarians’
expense and have then broken off their offensive without having arrived
at a ‘natural’ frontier. 1

The social barrage created by the establishment of a limes is subject
to the same law of Nature as the physical barrage created by the con¬
struction of a dam. When Man’s obstruction of such a natural drainage
system has brought into existence two artificially separated bodies of
water at two different levels, this human interference with Nature
provokes on Nature’s side an impulse to correct it. The water piled up
above the dam seeks to regain a common level with the water below the
barrier, and the degree of the consequent pressure is determined by the
quotient of the difference in height between the two levels and the mass
of the water held at the higher level of the two. In the structure of a
physical dam the engineer introduces safety-valves in the form of sluices
which can be opened, to whatever the necessary extent may be, whenever
the pressure of the head of water in the reservoir threatens to exceed
the limits of the dam’s capacity to resist it; and this obvious device for
safeguarding the dam against catastrophe by providing for a regulated
release of the pent-up waters is not overlooked by the political engineers
of a military limes, as we shall see. In this case, however, the attempted
remedy merely precipitates the cataclysm that it is designed to forestall,
for the social and psychological materials of which a limes is constructed
are so frail and friable that, if once this sandstone masonry is breached,
the outpouring waters of barbarian energy quickly sweep the whole
structure away. In the maintenance of a social barrage the relief of
pressure by a regulated release of water is, in fact, impracticable; there
can be no discharge from the reservoir without the barrage being
destroyed; and, since, from the moment when the barrage is erected, the
head of water above it keeps on accumulating inexorably ex hypothesi
through the transfer of energy from the civilization below the barrage
1 For examples of such barbarian avalanches, see V. v. 205. n. 3.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 13
and its transformation into barbarian energy in the reservoir above,
sooner or later the time is bound to come when breaking-point will have
been reached, and at that juncture a catastrophe will inevitably occur.

The day of doom may be postponed by attempts to strengthen the
structure of the barrage as an alternative to the impracticable expedient
of piercing it with sluices; but this cruder countermeasure can at best
put off the evil day without being equal to averting it; for, as we shall
also see, each arithmetical increase in the pressure of transferred and
transformed energy upon the limes increases the cost of proportionately
reinforcing the barrage by a geometrical progression. In this race be¬
tween attack and defence, the attack cannot fail to win in the long run;
and thus, on a static limes, Time works inexorably on the barbarian’s
side, as we have observed already by anticipation. 1 This ‘law’ also
signifies, however, that it does take time for barbarians barred out by a
limes to achieve their inevitable eventual break-through into the long-
coveted domain of a disintegrating civilization which looks to them like
an earthly paradise so long as ‘distance lends enchantment to the view’. 2
‘A long period of “education”, in which a semi-civilized people has been
profoundly affected from without by the influence of a civilized people,’ 3
is the necessary prelude 4 to the 'heroic age’ in which the barbarians have
their fling when a sagging and tottering limes at last collapses.

The Impracticability of a Policy of Non-Intercourse

Thus the erection of a limes sets in motion a play of social forces
which is bound to end disastrously for the builders; and, for them, the
only way of avoiding ultimate disaster would be to preclude this fatal
course of events by insulating completely from one another the two in¬
compatible societies whose respective domains the limes artificially
demarcates. A policy of non-intercourse is, indeed, the counsel of per¬
fection in the mind of any imperial government that is burdened with
the responsibility for keeping a limes in being. In practice, however, an
arbitrarily drawn military barrier can never perfectly or permanently
produce the effect of a ‘natural’ frontier provided by some untraversed

' In V. v. 209. * Campbell, Thomas: Pleasures 0} Hope, Part I, I. 7.

* Chadwick, The Heroic Age, p. 458.

* Apropos of the Serb heroic age at the climax of an Orthodox Christian Time of
Troubles, after the collapse of the Bulgarian and East Roman Empires and before the
imposition of a Pax Ottomanica, Chadwick points out in op. tit., on p. 448, that, ‘here
again .... as in the Teutonic and Cumbrian heroic ages, we have the case of a semi-
civilized and "juvenile” nation exposed fora long period to the influence of a civilized
but decaying empire'. Chadwick has, in fact, established an historical ‘law’ to the effect
that the precipitation of an heroic age is normally the cumulative effect of the radiation
of a decaying civilization into a primitive society over a period of time that is to be mea¬
sured, not in years, but in generations. Since the publication of Chadwick’s The Heroic
Age in a.d. 1912 it had, however, been demonstrated by Hitler that a diabolically 1 per¬
verse process of mis-education can artificially produce the same psychological^ effect in
a community that has advanced as far alone the path of civilization as pre-Nazi Ger¬
many, and that, under these artificial conditions, the process of barbanzation can be
so greatly speeded up as to be ‘telescoped’ into the span of a single generation. The
deliberate uprooting of the boys and youths of Nazi Germany from the habit, expecta¬
tion, and love of a settled life by the systematic application of Modern Western methods
of mass-suggestion had evoked a caricature of an heroic age by a process of ‘speeding-up’
that was a counterpart, on the psychological plane, of the visual effect produced by
speeding up the display of a film.

i 4 HEROIC AGES

sea or desert or mountain-range, because the wardens of the limes find
themselves unable effectively to control either the transfrontier barbar¬
ians or the cisfrontier marchmcn.

‘The very fact that the "barbarians” of the excluded territory are al¬
ways described as aggressive raiders, attackers and invaders shows that
geographical limits that appear "natural” and inevitable to one society
are not necessarily regarded as geographical obstacles by other societies,
which may in fact treat them as merely political obstacles.’ 1

And, conversely,

‘While the general policy of the [universal] state seeks to establish the
limit at which its interests can remain centripetal, and to prevent exces¬
sive expansion from passing over into centrifugal dispersion, this policy
is resisted and evaded by the particular interests of traders, would-be
colonisers, ambitious political and military careerists, and so forth, who
see opportunities for themselves across the border. Thus there grows up
a nexus of border interests which resents and works against the central
interest.’ 2

A striking illustration of this tendency among the marchmcn of a
universal state to make common cause with the barbarians beyond the
pale is afforded by the history of the relations between the Roman
Empire and the Hun Eurasian Nomads who broke out of the heart of the
Eurasian Steppe towards the end of the third quarter of the fourth
century of the Christian Era and established themselves on the Hungarian
Alfold. 3 Though the Huns were unusually ferocious barbarians from the
back of beyond, and though their ascendancy along the European limes
of the Roman Empire was ephemeral, a record of three notable cases of
fraternization had survived among the fragmentary remnants of the
contemporary accounts of this brief episode. Attila’s secretary of state
was a Pannonian subject of the Roman Empire named Orestes, whose
son Romulus Augustulus was to make his name by the facile achieve¬
ment of being the last Roman Emperor in the West. 4 The renegade
Greek business man from Viminacium whom the Greek historian and
Roman diplomatist Priscus encountered in Attila’s ordu on the Alfold
in a.d. 449 has already come to our noticed This adventurous Greek was
not even a marchman by birth. He had migrated to Viminacium, on the
Danubian limes of the Empire, from the interior of the Hellenic World
before being deported beyond the pale when his adopted city was cap¬
tured by the Huns in a.d. 441. The third member of the trio is ‘Eustace,
a merchant of Apamea’, who, ‘about the year a.d. 484, long after Attila
was dead, is found accompanying a band of Hun marauders in the role
of their chief adviser on a plundering expedition against Persia’. 6

The Hun Power in Europe came and went too quickly for this fraterni-

1 Lattimorc, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, p. 239. 1 Ibid., pp. 243-4.

J The occupation of the Alfdld by the Western Huns is dated tentatively on the
morrow of the Battle of Adrianople (eommssum a.d. 378) by Thompson, E. A.: A His¬
tory of Attila and the Huns (Oxford 1948, Clarendon rress), p. 26.

4 ‘Orestes Pannonius, qui eo tempore quando Attila ad Italiam venit se illi iunxit,
et eius notarius factus fuerat’ (Anonymus Valesianus, chap. 38, quoted by Thompson,
op. cit., p. 163). _ J In V. v. 473-4.

6 Thompson, op. cit., p. 175, quoting Zachariah of Mytilene, p. 152.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 15
zation between the aggressive barbarians and the renegade children of
the civilization that was their victim to produce any lasting historical
effect. It is, however, significant that it should have gone to such lengths
in so short a time between parties which, at their first encounter, had
been poles apart in their respective ways of life; and, in cases in which
the barbarian Power with whom the renegades had thrown in their lot
had been built on more durable foundations, this unholy alliance had
sometimes begotten noteworthy political offspring. The residuary con¬
tinental European successor-state of the Roman Empire in the West
was born of a partnership between Frankish laeti and Gallic bishops and
landlords who were the local representatives of the Roman Senatorial
Order. The Manchu Empire, which provided the main body of the Far
Eastern Society with a second instalment of its universal state, was born
of a similar partnership between Manchu transfrontier barbarians and
Chinese marchmcn settled beyond the Great Wall but within the Willow
Palisade. 1

Thus the existence of a limes always in practice generates social inter¬
course—and this in both directions—between the parties whom the
barrier is designed to insulate from one another. In this intercourse, as
we have seen,* war predominates over trade; and war is a relation which
is technologically educative in spite of being psychologically estranging.
A universal state cannot hold the transfrontier barbarians in check along
the line of the times without fighting them, and it cannot fight them
without involuntarily training them in its own superior way of doing this
sinister work. The art of war radiates more rapidly and penetratingly
than any other branch of technique; in the outflow of exports, weapons
are apt to arrive earlier and make their way farther afield than non-
lcthal tools; 1 and the imported weapons of an adjoining civilization are
copied by barbarian artificers with an adroitness that is proportionate
to the eagerness of the demand in the local barbarian market.

The Eurasian Nomad barbarians ‘could not arm themselves at all for
purposes of large-scale offensive operations without the assistance of
imported weapons. . . . Even the Mongols of the twelfth century—a
military' nation if ever there was one—had to import their weapons,
chiefly from China and Khurasan.’ 4 On the North-West Frontier of the
British Indian Empire from about a.d. 1890 onwards ‘the influx of rifles
and ammunition into tribal territory . .. completely changed the nature
of border warfare’ ; s and, while the transfrontier Pathans’ and BalQchis’
earliest source of supply of up-to-date Western small-arms was system¬
atic robbery from the British Indian troops on the other side of the line,
‘there would ... have been small cause for apprehension, had it not been
for the enormous growth of the arms traffic in the Persian Gulf, which,
both at Bushirc and [at] Muscat, was at first in the hands of British

1 Sec VI. vii. 128-9 arxi 332. * On pp. 8-9. above.

* ‘We may refer in particular to the Roman helmets and the large number of Roman
swords and shield-bosses found in deposits on the cast side of the province of Slcsvig—
a district remote from the Roman frontiers’ (Chadwick, op. cit., np. 444 ~ 5 )-

4 Thompson, E. A.: A History o] Attila and the Hum (Oxford 1948, Clarendon Press),
pp. 173 and 172. ...

* Davies, C.C.: The Problem of the North-West Frontier, 1S90-X90S (Cambndge
1932, University Press), p. 176.

16 HEROIC AGES

traders’ 1 —a striking example of the tendency for the private interests of
the empire’s subjects in doing business with the transfrontier barbarians
to militate against the public interest of the imperial government in
keeping the barbarians at bay. ‘When these methods failed, there still
remained the Kohat rifle factory, owned by Pathans, and situated in the
strip of independent territory which separates Peshawar from Kohat.’ 2
‘The possession of arms of precision has also produced a change in
Pathan tactics, for, with the exception of certain ghSssi rushes, there has
been a tendency for the recklessness which characterized the earlier
struggles to disappear.’ 5

The Barbarians' Exploitation of their Civilized Neighbours' Weapons

The transfronticr barbarian is not, however, content simply to practise
the superior tactics which he has learnt from an adjoining civilization
without proceeding to adapt them to the local terrain. Ex hypothesise al¬
ready has the initial advantage of being at home in a theatre of military
operations in which his opponent is a stranger, since the limes is situated
in barbarian territory which the civili2ation has occupied, up to this line,
by force of arms in an aggressive previous chapter of its history. When
the barbarian combines his hereditary mastery of the local situation with
a creative adaptation of borrowed weapons and tactics, superior to his
own, to suit the local conditions of warfare, he becomes formidable
indeed. His best opportunities for putting his civilized adversary at this
military disadvantage arise where the local terrain displays some strongly
pronounced physical characteristic which is unfamiliar and adverse to
the civilized belligerent and yet at the same time lends itself to the
employment, with adroit modifications, of weapons and tactics that have
been borrowed from him by his barbarian antagonist.

For example, on the maritime frontiers of the Carolingian Empire and
the Kingdom of Wessex the Scandinavian pirates turned to such good
account a technique of shipbuilding and seamanship which they had
acquired, perhaps, from the Frisian maritime marchmen of a nascent
Western Christendom that they captured the command of the sea and,
with it, the initiative in the offensive warfare which they proceeded to
wage along the coasts and up the rivers of the Western Christian
countries that were their victims. 4 When, in pushing up the rivers of
the British Isles and France, the Scandinavian raiders reached the limit
beyond which they could not make their way farther by water even in
their shallow and slender dragon-ships, they exchanged one borrowed
weapon for another and continued their aggressive campaign on horse¬
back instead of on ship-board, since the invaded countries were stocked
with horses for them to seize and they had mastered the Frankish art 5
of cavalry-fighting as well as the Frisian art of navigation. The Cossack
barbarians proved equally ubiquitous and elusive in their attacks on the
steppe-empire of the Golden Horde when these river-pirates, lurking on
islands among cataracts where the Nomad was out of his element, added

1 Davie*, op. cit., p. 177. * Ibid.

5 Ibid., p. 176. 4 See II. ii. 344-6.

* Frankish by adoption, Sarmatian by origin (see IV. iv. 439-45).

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 17
a second string to their bow by also mastering the Tatar art of horse¬
manship. 1 Conversely the Saka Nomad barbarian invaders of an Hellenic
empire in India in the second and the last century b.c. added a second
string to their bow by exchanging the saddle for the deck in order to
take advantage of the waterways offered to an invader by the River Indus
and its tributaries. 2

The militarily decisive employment of the horse by sedentary bar¬
barians beyond the frontier of a Nomad steppe-empire had had counter¬
parts in cases of the more usual type in which the Nomad had been the
representative of Barbarism and the husbandman the representative of
Civilization. The original domestication of the horse appears to have
been achieved by Aryan Nomad barbarians from the Transcaspian
fringe of the Great Eurasian Steppe who mounted the Iranian Plateau
and broke across it, in the eighteenth or the seventeenth century B.c., 3
into the domain of an Empire of Sumer and Akkad that had been re¬
constituted by Hammurabi. At this tempestuous first entry of the war-
horse upon the stage of History the new-fangled animate weapon makes
its appearance, not as a cavalryman’s mount, but as a charioteer’s
tractor; and the two-wheeled battle-car, drawn by a pair of draught-
animals under the yoke, is shown by the archaeological evidence to have
been a weapon which the Aryan Nomad barbarians had borrowed from
the Sumeric Society against which these invaders eventually employed
it with such deadly effect.

‘In the . . . Early Dynastic reliefs from Ur and Kafajah, and on the
famous inlaid “standard” from the royal tombs of Ur, . . . ass-drawn
chariots are shown in great detail, with solid wheels made of two half¬
discs dowelled together against the hub ... It looks ... as if the battle-
car was an invention of Early Dynastic Sumer and that its use was adopted,
with other technological devices such as metallurgy and the shaft-hole
axe . . ., by the Indo-Europeans on the northerly fringes of the Kingdom
of Sumer and Akkad soon after 2000 B.C., [and was] given added
speed and lightness by the use of horses and the invention of the spoked
wheel.’ 4

On the Syrian limes of the Roman Empire the ground had been prepared
for the titanic irruption of the transfronticr Arab Nomad barbarians in
the seventh century of the Christian Era by the recent introduction of
the war-horse into the Arabian Peninsula some sixteen or seventeen
centuries after its arrival in the adjoining ‘Fertile Crescent’ from its place
of origin somewhere in Central Asia.* The less dramatic, yet also
momentous, irruption of the Berber Nomad barbarians across the
Empire’s North-West African limes in the preceding century had been a
similar consequence of the recent introduction of the camel from Arabia
into North Africa. 6

« Sec II. ii. 154-7 “nd V. v. 282-4.

* See Tarn, W.W.: The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge 1938, University
Press), pp. 320, 322, and 328-30.

* Sec the Note on Chronology in vol. x, pp. 167-212. below.

J bee the Note on Chronology in vol. x, pp. 107-212. below.

* Piggott, Stuart: Prehistoric India (London 1050, Pelican), pp. 274 and 276.
s i.e. at about the beginning of the Christian Era, according to Cactani, L.: i
Storia Orientate, vol. i (Milan 1911, Hoepli), p. 346.

4 See Gautier, E.F.: Lei SiMes Obseurs du Maghreb (Paris 1927, Payot), pp. 165-79-

Studi di

iS HEROIC AGES

The most dramatic case in the history of the war-horse in which this
weapon had been turned by a barbarian against the civilization from
which he had acquired it was to be found in the New World, where the
horse had been unknown till it had been imported by post-Columbian
Western Christian intruders from the European side of the Atlantic.
Owing to this lack of a domesticated animal which, in the Old World,
had been the making of the Nomad stock-breeder’s way of life, the
Great Plains of the Mississippi Basin, 1 * which would have been a herds¬
man’s paradise, had remained the hunting-grounds of tribes who
followed their game laboriously on foot over these great open spaces.
The belated advent of the horse in this ideal horse-country had effects on
the life of the immigrant and the life of the native which, while in both
cases revolutionary, were different in every other respect. The introduc¬
tion of the horse on to the plains of Texas, Venezuela, and Argentina
made Nomad stock-breeders out of the descendants of 150 generations
of husbandmen; 1 the same potent technological revolution made mobile
mounted war-bands out of the Indian hunting-tribes on the Great Plains
of North America beyond the northern frontier of the Spanish vice¬
royalty of New Spain 3 and beyond the western frontier of the English
colonies that eventually became the United States. In this case the
borrowed weapon, mated with a local terrain that was ideal for its em¬
ployment, did not give the transfrontier barbarian the ultimate victory
against an adversary equipped with the far more potent weapons of
Industrialism; but it did enable him to postpone the day of his final
discomfiture and to inflict one signal disaster on the aggressive civiliza¬
tion in the last chapter of this North American frontier’s history. 4 5

While the nineteenth century of the Christian Era saw the prairie
Indian of North America turn one of the European intruder’s weapons
against its original owner by disputing the possession of the Plains with
the aid of the horse, the eighteenth century had already seen the forest
Indian turn the European musket to account in a new-fangled warfare
of sniping and ambuscades which, with the screening forest as the
Indian sharp-shooter’s confederate, had proved more than a match for
the tactics of the Potsdam parade ground, whose close formation, precise
evolutions, and steady volleys—designed for polite hostilities on Euro¬
pean battle-fields—courted destruction when unimaginatively employed
against adversaries who had mated the European musket with the
American forest. s In days before the invention of fire-arms, correspond-

1 Sec Webb, W.P.: The Great Plaint (New York 1031, Ginn).

* See II. i. 25J-6.

J The enterprisingness of the nineteenth-century Apache* and Comanche* in mount¬
ing on horse-back is in piquant contrast to the conservatism of their Spanish antagonists,
whom the turn of the century found still using the lance and shield and even the bow-
ond-arrows—apart from an elite armed with fire-locks of a sixteenth-century pattern
(see III. iii. 136, n. 1).

4 The history of the Indian frontier of the United States is examined further on
pp. 630-50, below.

5 In thus turning to account the military potentialities of the North American forest
the Indians merely postponed the date of their extermination at the hands of their
assailants from beyond the Atlantic. If, before the Europeans' advent, they had managed
to turn the forest’s economic potentialities to account by cutting it down and replacing
it by a populous agricultural country-side, they might not merely have postponed their

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 19
ing adaptations of the current weapons of an aggressive civilization to
the opportunities offered by forest warfare had enabled the barbarian
denizens of the Russian forests to bend, without breaking, before the
blast of repeated explosions of Nomad aggression from the Eurasian
Steppe, and to survive the ephemeral dominions of successive Nomad
lords of the Steppe’s Great Western Bay, from the Royal Scythians to
the Golden Horde. 1 A similar response to a comparable challenge had
enabled the barbarian denizens of the Transrhenanc forests of Northern
Europe to save a still-forest-clad Germany from the Roman conquest that
had overtaken an already partially cleared and cultivated Gaul by inflict¬
ing on the Romans a decisively deterrent disaster in the Teutoburger-
wald in a.d. 9.

The Barbarians' Exploitation of their Native Terrain

The line along which the military frontier between the Roman Empire
and the Continental North European Barbarians consequently came to
rest for the next four centuries carries its own explanation on the face of
it in terms of terrain and tactics. It was the line beyond which a forest
that had reigned here since the end of the latest bout of glaciation was
still decisively preponderant over the works of Homo Agricola which had
opened the way for the march of the Roman legions from the Mediter¬
ranean up to the Rhine and the Danube. This line, however, also
happened, as we have observed,* to be the longest alincment that could
have been found for a Roman military frontier across Continental Europe
by a surveyor perversely seeking to draw the frontier out to the maximum
possible length; and, even if the trade had been drawn, not from the
mouth of the Rhine to the burdensomely distant mouth of the Danube,
but along the shortest line between the Baltic and the Black Sea or
between the North Sea and the Adriatic, we may surmise that, in the
long run, this hypothetical shortest practicable Roman times in Con¬
tinental Europe would have suffered the fate that actually overtook the
long-drawn-out historic line between Batavia and the Dobruja; for,
while it is evident that the burden of maintaining a limes varies in weight
in proportion to the frontier’s length, the fatal weakness of a times is not
its length but its stationariness and rigidity, and this weakness, being
intrinsic, is irremediable.

On the local anti-barbarian frontiers of the still surviving parochial
states of a Westernizing World which, at the time of writing, embraced
all but a fraction of the total habitable and traversable surface of the
planet, two of the recalcitrant barbarian’s faithful non-human allies had
already been outmanoeuvred by a Modern Western industrial technique.
The Forest had long since fallen a victim to cold steel, while the Steppe,
from its parkland fringe to its desert heart, had been penetrated by the
petrol-driven internal combustion engine of the aeroplane and the
terrestrial motor vehicle travelling on the treads of a revolving belt over

doom but have averted it at the price of losing their political independence (sec IT.
ii. 277-8). A thickly settled Central American and Andean peasantry did survive a
Spanish conquest.

* See V. v. 281-9. In v - v - 591 - 5 -

HEROIC AGES

terrain where wheels could no longer convey it. The barbarian’s
mountain ally, however, had proved a harder nut to crack, and the
nineteenth-century Russian feat of taming the Caucasus and twentieth-
century French feat of taming the Atlas and the Rif had not yet been
emulated by any corresponding domestication of either the western or
the eastern rim of the Iranian Plateau. At this date the serried tiers of
the Zagros Range, astride a theoretical Perso-Turkish and Perso-'Iraqi
frontier, were still serving as fastnesses for wild Kurds, Lurs, Bakhti-

S rls, and the motley wild highlanders of Fars, while the Sulayman
nge and its ramifications were performing the same service for wild
Pathans and Baluchis who were hardly conscious of a theoretical Indo-
Afghan frontier that had been drawn across the map of their homelands
in a.d. 1893 and had been inherited in a.d. 1947 from a British Indian
Empire by a Pakistan that was one of its three successor-states.

This highlander rear-guard of a Barbarism which, in a ubiquitously
Westernizing World, was now fighting with its back to the same advanc¬
ing wall that it was confronting, had been displaying, in its latest forlorn
hopes, an impressive ingenuity in turning to its own advantage, on its
own terrain , some of the latter-day devices of an industrial Western
military technique. By this tour de force the Rif I highlanders astride the
theoretical boundary between the Spanish and French zones of Morocco
had inflicted on the Spaniards at Anwal in the summer of a.d. 1921 a
disaster 1 comparable to the annihilation of Varus’s three legions by the
Cherusci and their neighbours in the Teutoburgerwald in a . d . 9, and
had left their mark on History by making the Romanesque structure of
French Power in North-West Africa rock on its foundations in the
summer of a.d. 1925. By the same sleight of hand the Mahsuds of
Waziristan had baffled repeated British attempts to subdue them during
the ninety-eight years that had elapsed between a.d. 1849, when the
British had inherited this anti-barbarian frontier from the Sikhs as a
penalty for having annexed the Sikh Raj, and a . d . 1947, when the
British had disencumbered themselves of a still unsolved Indian North-
West Frontier problem by bequeathing this unwelcome legacy to a fully
self-governing Dominion of Pakistan.

In the trial of strength in a.d. 1925 between the Rlfi barbarian war¬
lord ‘Abd-al-Karim and the great French soldier and administrator
Marshal Lyautey,

‘the prospective scene of operations, like the adjoining parts of the
Spanish Zone, was an arid treeless country, covered with a thorny under¬
growth, broken up by ravines, and cursed with a scanty water-supply;
and this was almost an ideal terrain for the Rlfi forces, who were thoroughly
at home in their native environment and at the same time had adopted
such elements in the Western art of war as could be employed there to
good purpose. Every Rlfi fighting-man was an adept at taking cover, and,
notwithstanding the brokenness of the country, he was disconcertingly
mobile, since he lived in the open and carried no impedimenta except a
handful of food, in the hood of his cloak, and his rifle and ammunition.
With rifles, machine-guns, and small-arms ammunition the Rifis had
1 For details see Toynbee, A.J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1025, vol i (London
1927, Milford), pp. 115-16.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 21

supplied themselves abundantly at the Spaniards’ expense; and, although
the captured Spanish artillery was clumsily served and there was no air
force on the Rif! side, these were luxuries and not necessities under the
local conditions. On the other hand the Rifi High Command had not only
captured but [had] learnt to utilise field telephones, and by means of
these they were able to keep in touch with their widely scattered and con¬
stantly moving units, and to execute concerted manoeuvres over as wide
a field as their opponents. They appear to have established district depots
of rifles and ammunition, to which the tribesmen could be called up at
short notice, fitted out, and then dispatched to any point where they
were needed. The bulk of their forces was extremely fluid—the men being
perpetually called up in relays and perpetually released (as far as the
course of the campaign allowed) to work in the fields. Every tribe, how¬
ever, appears to have been required to supply a permanent contingent,
and the tribal levies were stiffened by a small standing army of regulars*
(mostly drawn from 'Abd-al-Karim’s own tribe, the Banu Wuryaghal of
Ajdir) who were uniformly trained and equipped and were in receipt of
pay and rations—in consideration of which they had to hand over their
booty to the Government.

‘The Rifi tactics (which were directed by *Abd-al-KarIm’s brother,
Mahammad, the mining engineer, as Commander-in-Chief) were to send
fonvard a screen of irregulars who filtered through the enemy’s line and
raised the tribes in his rear—if necessary by coercion. By this means the
Rifi army grew like a snowball as it advanced, each tribe whose territory
became the scene of fighting being called out eti masse. The tendency
towards desultoriness and incoherence, which was to be looked for in an
army recruited in this way, was guarded against by placing all the tribal
contingents under the command of regulars, but the main body of the
regular troops was carefully husbanded and kept in reserve. Advancing
behind the screen of tribesmen they dug themselves in, provided a sup¬
port upon which the skirmishers could fall back, and resisted enemy
counter-attacks in hand-to-hand fighting,* with a tenacity which reminded
their French adversaries of European warfare.’ 3

Through this skilful adaptation of tactics to terrain the Rifi offensive
in the summer of a.d. 1925 came within an ace of cutting the corridor,
traversed by a railway, which linked the effectively occupied part of the
French Zone of Morocco, along the Atlantic seaboard, with the main
body of French North-West Africa in Algeria and Tunisia, and which
thereby insulated the still unsubdued Rifis astride the boundary between
the French and Spanish zones of Morocco from the likewise still un¬
subdued tache de Taza , immediately south of the French corridor, and
from the much larger unsubdued area, farther south again, in the fast¬
nesses of the Atlas. The threat to the corridor at the crisis of the cam¬
paign may be said, without exaggeration, to have put in jeopardy the

' Estimated at from 6,000 to 10,000 men (Foreign Affairs of New York, January
1926).

* 'Marshal Lyautcy has found himself in the presence, not indeed of highly scientific
armies, but of a remarkable infantry, which ia the equal of any infantry in the World in
courage, character ar.d marksmanship’ (M. Painlevd in the French Chamber, 9th July,
1925). For accounts of the military organization and tactics of the Rifi forces, tee The
Times, 19th May, 1925; Le Temps , 2xst and 23rd May, and 22nd June; three articles
by M. Reginald Kann in Le Temps, 7th. 9th, and 13th August; and an article by Signor
Luciano Magrini in the Corriere della Sera, 30th August.

3 Toynbee, Survey, 1923, vol. i, pp. 135-6.

HEROIC AGES
whole French position in the Maghrib; for if the Rif is had broken
through they might have raised the Atlas tribes, and such an extension of
hostilities would have immeasurably increased the strain on French
military resources.

Interests of comparable magnitude were at stake for the British Raj
in India in the trial of strength between the Mahsud barbarians and the
armed forces of the British Indian Empire in the Waziristan campaign of
a.d. 1919-20; for, if in this contest the Mahsuds had got the better of
the Great Power whom they were audaciously defying, the conflagration
might have spread through the length and breadth of the unsubdued
country astride the theoretical Indo-Afghan frontier. In this campaign
likewise the barbarian belligerent’s strength lay in his skilful adaptation
of Modem Western arms and tactics to a terrain that was unpropitious
for their use on the lines that were orthodox for their Western inventors.

‘The elaborate and costly equipment which had been invented on the
European battlefields of the General War [of a.d. 1914-1918], in operations
on level ground between two highly organised armies, was very much
less effective when employed against parties of tribesmen lurking in a
tangle of mountains.’ 1

On the other hand,

‘as a fighting man the WazTr and the Mahsud, always more particularly
the latter, when in his own country, may be classed very high. Agile and
enduring, he is possessed on his own hillsides of an astonishing mobility,
which is intensified by complete disregard of impedimenta, as well as
by a natural hardiness that greatly simplifies all supply problems. His
skill with the small-bore rifle is considerable, and is only surpassed by a
great capacity to exploit the slightest weakness shown by his enemy.
Disregard of methods of security on the one hand, a too slavish routine in
their enforcement on the other, miscalculations as to time and space, all
these faults have been repeatedly penalized by the Mahsud and WazTr.
The tribesman is gifted with untiring patience and vigilance in observing
an enemy when the latter is on the move, a characteristic which makes
it extremely difficult to outflank or to surprise him. He is an expert in
the attack of detached posts and in the surprise of small parties. This skill
may be enhanced by the employment of ruses which can justly be stig¬
matized as closely akin to treachery.’ 1

In order to defeat, even inconclusively, transfrontier barbarians who
have attained the degree of military expertise shown by the Mahsuds in
a.d. 1919 and by the Rifis in a.d. 1925, the Power behind the threatened
limes has to exert an effort that—measured in terms either of man¬
power or of equipment or of money—is quite disproportionate to the
modest challenge from its gadfly opponents to which this ponderous
counter-attack is the irreducible minimum of response.

‘The maximum fighting strength of the Mahsuds was estimated at
16,000 and that of the Wana Wazlrs (who did not follow the example of

1 Toynbee, op. cit.. p. <57.

* de Watteville, H.: Waxirittan, 1919-1020 (London 1925, Constable), p. 23.
Evidence bearing out this appreciation will be found payim. There arc striking examples
on pp. 130, 156, 207-9, and 213. The quotations from this book have been made with
the permission of the publishers.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 23

the Tochi Wazirs in submitting) at 7,000; but the effective number of
combatants was limited by the number of efficient breach-loading rifles
at their disposal, and this was estimated at not more than 8,000 in the
case of the Mahsuds and 3,000 in that of the Wana Wazirs. Moreover,
the number of small-bore rifles burning smokeless powder which the
recalcitrant tribesmen possessed was estimated (even after their capture
in May 1919) at not more than 3,500 in all, and this limited the size of the
tribal force which would be under arms at any given moment, since
throughout the campaign the tribesmen rigidly refrained, in daylight
operations, from using rifles burning black powder, in order not to reveal
their positions to the enemy. The largest force ever actually assembled
at one moment was believed to have numbered 4,500, but this number
was quite exceptional. 1 *

'On the other side the Indian Expeditionary Force numbered 29,256
combatants and 34,987 non-combatants on the 13th November, 1919, and
rose to an eventual daily average of 41,800 combatants and 37,900 non-
combatants approximately . . . [But] less than a fifth of the total force,
and hardly more than a fifth of the combatants, could be included in the
Striking Force, which consisted on the 8th November of 8,500 com¬
batants, 6,500 followers, 1,400 horses and equipment animals, and 7,300
transport animals’. 1

The four years of arduous fighting between the forces of the British
Indian Empire and the barbarians of Waziristan in a.d. 1919-23 were
the significantly paradoxical consequence of a Third Anglo-Afghan War
in which the barbarian belligerent had been defeated in a nine-days’
campaign (9th-17th May, 1919). The Afghan aggressors’ perform¬
ance had been as ignominious as the British victors’ had been brilliant; 3

but this relatively easy victory over a vulnerably organized barbarian
principality 4 had to be purchased by the civilized belligerent at the cost
of a disproportionate effort of the same relative order of magnitude that
was afterwards to be exacted by the harder task of chastising the elusive
Mahsuds. On the Afghan side the concentration of regular troops at the
end of April 1919 was estimated by the British military intelligence at a
total figure of not more than 35,260 sabres and rifles, 5 while on the
Indian side ‘at one time the strength of the force employed trans-Indus
amounted to 340,000 men and 158,000 animals, and it will readily be
understood that the maintenance of these numbers with depleted means
of transportation was a problem of considerable difficulty.’ 6 The diffi¬
culties were increased by an epidemic of cholera and a heat wave, 7 and by

I See de Wntteviile, op. cit., pp. 24-25.—A.J.T.

3 Toynbee, op. cit., pp. 556-7, following de Wattevillc, op. cit.

’ A brief account of this war will be found in Toynbee, A. J.: Survey of International
Jiff airs, 2920-1923 (London 1925, Milford), pp. 376-84.

* In terms of the barbarian reservoir beyond the limes of the Roman Empire on the
European Continent the war-bands of Waziristan might be compared with those of
the Transrhenane German tribes that annihilated Varus’s army in a.d. 9, whereas the
principality’ of Afghanistan might be compared with the Bohemian principality of Maro-
boduus, which was saved from Roman attack in a.d. 6 by the outbreak of a Pannoman
revolt, or with the Transylvanian principality of Decebalua, which was conquered by
the Romans in A.D. iot-6.

s Dispatch, dated the 1st November, 1919, from General Sir C. C. Monro, Com-
mandcr-in-Chicf in India (printed as Second Supplement to the London Gazelle of
the 12th March, 1920), §§ 20-21. _ .......

6 Monro, op. cit., § 5- 7 See ,b,d -> §$ x 6 _, 7 -

24 HEROIC AGES

the size of the theatre of operations. This problem of geographical scale
was given prominence in the report of the British Commander-in-Chief.

'During the course of the war our troops were engaged on a front
extending along the whole length of the Afghan frontier from Chitral on
the north-east to Seistan on the south-west, a total distance of about
x,ooo miles; indeed, the fighting front may be said to have extended still
further, for our line of communication defence troops on the 300 miles
of road between Robat and Rui Khaf were kept constantly on their guard
against raids from across the border and were at one time directly threat¬
ened by a small Afghan force which was detached from Herat towards
the Persian frontier. Never before have simultaneous operations been
undertaken on the frontier of India which have covered so wide an extent
of front.’ 1

The ascertained maximum trans-Indus British strength of 340,000,
unlike the estimated Afghan strength of 35,260, included, of course,
non-combatants, and the Afghans were thought to have been counting
in A.D. 1919 on raising the unsubdued barbarians, on either side of
the theoretical Indo-Afghan frontier, whose total strength in a levie
en masse was estimated at approximately 120,000 rifles. Yet, even if
Amanallah had not been disappointed in this hope (as in a.d. 1925 ‘Abd-
al-Karim was to be disappointed in his similar hope of raising the tribes¬
men of the Atlas), and if the forces of the British Indian Empire had had
to meet a combined force of 150,000 Afghan regular and tribal irregular
barbarian fighting-men, their maximum total number of men employed
trans-Indus would still have been more than double the total number of
their adversaries; and, if the ratio of non-combatants to combatants in
General Monro’s force in the spring of a.d. 1919 was the same, or
thereabouts, as it was in the expeditionary force that was operating in
Waziristan later in the same year, 2 this immense mobilization of man¬
power would only have enabled the British Indian Empire to meet the
Afghan regular army and tribal levy with a combatant strength that, if
the tribesmen had actually risen en masse, would have been no more
than just equal to the barbarian enemy's combined total.

The most significant point about this disparity between the efforts
respectively required of the British and of their opponents on the
North-West frontier of India in a.d. 1919 was that the disparity had
recently begun to increase, as is revealed by a comparison of the
Waziristan campaigns of a.d. 1917 and a.d. 1919 with their predecessors
in the series.

‘In spite of the ease with which the campaign of 1917 was brought to
its conclusion, certain facts were already becoming patent. Whereas in
i860 a single brigade had marched right through Waziristan without grave
hindrance, and whereas in 1894 and 1901 widely separated columns were
employed with impunity, yet for many years it was beginning to be
believed that an invader of Waziristan must employ greater forces and
observe greater precautions. Further, just as the MahsQds were acquiring
more rifles of range and precision firing smokeless powder, and also
exhibiting greater skill in their use, so the invader was ever inclined to

1 Monro, op. at., § 27.

a See pp. 22-23, above-

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 25

resort to more scientific equipment and more impedimenta. In addition,
public opinion now demanded more comforts for the troops, while a fresh
difficulty was accruing out of the increasing number of medical units
accompanying any expedition. Circumstances were thus all tending to
complicate the transport problem and to augment the size of supply
trains. Yet the lines of communication were unquestionably becoming
more vulnerable than they were before the tribesmen possessed modern
weapons. It was still necessary' to employ long convoys of primitive pack
transport; even in 1919 motor transport was impracticable above the
lower valleys.’ 1

The same talc is told by the history of the Roman Imperial Army,
which had, as we have seen, 2 to be progressively increased in numerical
strength to offset the progressive increase in the military efficiency of
the transfrontier barbarians whom it was its duty to hold at bay. When,
early in the third century of the Empire’s existence, Scptimius Scverus
{imperabat a . d . 193-211) added three new legions 1 to the thirty that had
been maintained since a.d. 83* for the defence of the static frontiers that
had been first marked out by Augustus {imperabat 31 b . c .- a . d . 14), the
consequent additional strain on the Empire’s man-power and revenue
was not very serious; but it was quite another matter when, early in the
fourth century of the Empire’s existence, Diocletian {imperabat a . d .
284-304) found himself compelled to raise the Army’s strength again,
and this time from about 300,000 men to about 500,000.

The Besieged Civilization's Inability to Redress the Balance by Recourse to
Organization and Technique

In an economically complex civilization with a money economy, any
increase in the numerical strength of a regular standing army entails a
corresponding increase in the pressure of taxation upon national income.
The diversion of an intolerably large, and still insatiably growing, pro¬
portion of a dwindling national income to meet rising costs of public
services is the most conspicuous of the social maladies that were the
death of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century and in the
Centre and East in the seventh century of the Christian Era; and, while
one cause of this cancerous growth of the fiscal burden on the backs of the
Roman Imperial Government’s subjects was an increase in the personnel
of the Imperial Civil Service to fill an administrative vacuum arising
from the progressive decay of local self-government, 1 a second cause—
which would probably turn out to have been by far the more potent of
the two, if all the relevant figures were known to us—was the increase in
the man-power of the Imperial Army which was required in order to
meet the increase in the transfrontier barbarians’ military efficiency. We
do know that, in the annual budgets of the British Raj in India during
the last century of its existence, the cost of defence (which, in practice,
meant the defence of the North-West Frontier) was an item that absorbed
a disconcerting proportion of the revenue. 6

» de Watteville. op. cit., pp. 43 - 44 - ,

J In VI. vii. 156; 321, n. 2; and 3 * 3 . n. S- 1 See VI. vu. ij6.

* See VI. vii. 321. n. 2. * See VI. vu. S9-60 and 166.

* ‘The most striking feature on the expenditure side of the central budget is the very

26 HEROIC AGES

Thus, if the chronic warfare between the defenders and assailants of a
limes is waged in terms of competitive staying power, the defence is
bound to collapse sooner or later, since, so far as it is able to hold its
own, it can achieve this only by exerting an effort which becomes more
and more disproportionate to the effort exacted from its increasingly
efficient barbarian adversaries. 1 In this situation there are two obvious
courses to which the defence may resort in the hope of arresting, by one
means or the other, this progressive deterioration of its own position. It
can mobilize for the defence of the limes either its own capacity for
organization and technique, in which a civilization is superior to its
barbarian neighbours almost ex hypothesi, or its barbarian adversaries’
capacity for taking military advantage of the local terrain through which
the limes runs. These two policies of elaborating its own organization
and armaments and of recruiting barbarian man-power are not, of course,
mutually exclusive, and a harassed Power behind a limes had usually
resorted to both in its desperate search for some means of reversing the
accelerating inclination of the scales of war in its barbarian opponents’
favour which is the inexorable effect of the passage of Time on a frontier
where the civilized party is content to remain passive.

In the last struggle for life of an Hellenic Civilization which had never
been technical-minded and which had long since lost any faint pro¬
clivities in this direction that it might occasionally have displayed in
earlier chapters of its history, it was not technique but organization that
was called into play by Diocletian in his heroic attempt to solve a prob¬
lem of defence which had been shown to have become a question of life
and death for the Roman Empire by the break-through of the trans¬
frontier barbarians into the interior of the Empire on all fronts during
the anarchic years a.d. 235-84.

Diocletian’s solution was to reorganize completely the Roman
Imperial system of defence which had been left unchanged in principle
during the three centuries that had elapsed since its original institution
by Augustus. Augustus’s first concern had been to give the Hellenic

high proportion of the expenditure on defence, which, under a scheme introduced in
19*8-29, has been stabilised for a period of 4 years at Rs. 55 crorcs per year. This
figure is over 60 per cent, of the total central revenues, and nearly a third of the total
net centra! and provincial revenues of the country taken together’ (Report of the Indian
Statutory Commission, presented May 1930, vol. i (London 1930, H.M. Stationery
Office, Cmd. 3568), § 413. P- 36a).

' The difference in the degree of the effort required from a civilized army and from a
barbarian war-band in order to produce an equal quantum of military effect was once
expressed in quaintly concrete financial terms by a correspondent of the present
writer's in a comparison between the respective performances of the British Army and
the Hijfizi Army against the Turkish Army in the General War of a . d . 1914-18. ‘From
first to last, the military operations of the Hijazi Army accounted for 65,000 Turkish
troops at the cost of less than £100 per head of subsidy, whereas, in the firitish Army’s

E ns against the Turks, each Turkish casualty or prisoner cost from £1,500 to
(Toynbee, A. J.: Suney of International Affairs , 1925. vol. i (London 1927,
), p. 283, n. 2).

Ibn Khaldun ( Muqaddamdt , translated by dc Slane, Baron Mc.G. (Paris 1863-8,
Imprimcrie Impiriale, 3 vols.), vol. ii, pp. 92-94), propounds, as a general ‘law’, a ten¬
dency for the burden of taxation in an empire to grow heavier with the lapse of time,
but (thinking, as he does, exclusively in terms of empires founded by Nomad bar¬
barians) he attributes this tendency to increasing demands of the imperial government
for defraying rising costs of living incurred by the ruling elements. He makes no
mention in this passage of rising costs of imperial defence.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 27
World the maximum opportunity of recuperating from the exhaustion
produced by a hundred years of social revolution rankling into civil war,
and one of his measures for attaining this end had been to reduce to a
minimum the swollen armies that had been mobilized for this fratricidal
warfare in the last paroxysm of an Hellenic Time of Troubles. Apart from
a modest personal body-guard, he had provided in his permanent mili¬
tary establishment for nothing in the nature of a reserve. His troops of
the line barely sufficed to demarcate the Imperial frontiers; they were,
in fact, little more than a police-cordon; and, for the security of the
interior of the Empire, the Augustan regime relied, in lieu of an adequate
provision for defence, on the superiority of its professional army over
the transfronticr barbarians in military quality and on the awe inspired
by Roman power, which might be expected to deter the barbarians
from putting the Imperial defences to any serious practical test. 1 By
Diocletian’s day this hazardously economical security system had long
since gone bankrupt; for the military efficiency which the barbarians
had been progressively acquiring in the school which the limes afforded
had eventually given them both the nerve and the skill to break through
the cordon confining them; and in such an emergency the Imperial
Government’s only means of repairing one breach was to risk another
by denuding some distant sector of the frontier that happened at
the moment to be quiescent. Though the Romans held the interior
lines and could avail themselves of easy and rapid water-transport
across the maritime heart of their empire for shuttling troops from
one breached frontier to another, the system was radically unsound, and
Diocletian reformed it by taking a cue which Scptimius Severus had
given to his successors when he had placed one of his three new legions
in reserve at Albano. Diocletian organized a reserve which amounted in
numbers to perhaps not much less than two-fifths of the total strength
of a military establishment that was perhaps larger by two-thirds than
the Severan ; J the best units in the Army were assigned to this new force ; 3
and it was designed to be as mobile as the raiding barbarian war-bands
which it was its task to overtake, bring to battle, and destroy. 4

From the scientific standpoint of a professional soldier, this Diocletia-
nic system of substituting defence in depth for linear defence by organiz¬
ing a mobile reserve in support of the front line represents a notable
advance in the art of war; and it was no doubt partly owing to this
military reform that the Empire—which had seemed to be in the throes
of dissolution during the half century immediately preceding Diocle¬
tian’s accession—actually held out for a hundred years longer in the
West and for three hundred years longer in the East and Centre. Yet,
though the civilian population might find the conditions of the Dio-
cletianic Age a relief from those of the foregoing bout of anarchy, they
would have been happy indeed to exchange them for those of the
militarily archaic Augustan Principate.

'he greatness of the Roman People has propagated an awe of them beyond the
and beyond the Empire's established limits’ (Tacitus: Germania, chap, xxix.

« ’The

Rhine . _ . _ ■ .

§3, apropos of the relation of a transfrontier Teuton community, the Mattiaci, to the
Roman Empire in the writer's day). 1 See VI. vii. 323, n. 5.

> See VI. vii. 322. « See VI. vii. 323.

28 HEROIC AGES

The truth is that Diocletian’s professionally admirable military re¬
organization dealt the civilian population a double blow. On the one
hand the belated provision of a numerically sufficient mobile reserve
accounted for that huge increase in the total military establishment
which had, as we have seen, 1 to be paid for by the higher taxation of a
lower national income. On the other hand the concentration of the Hite
of the Army in the mobile reserve still further lowered the moral, as well
as the efficiency, of the cordon-troops (now explicitly called limitanei,
to distinguish them invidiously from the comitatenses serving in the
Emperor’s counter-war-band); the last pretence of the Army’s being
able to hold the barbarians at the limes was now virtually abandoned;
and it came to be taken for granted that the war-zone, in the warfare
between the Roman Imperial Army and its barbarian adversaries, was
no longer the glacis on the barbarians’ side of the limes, and no longer
even the marches of the Empire in the limes' immediate rear, but terri¬
tories in the interior that were the Empire’s economic and cultural vitals.
The scientifically impeccable watchword of ‘defence in depth’ was, in
fact, a euphemism for glozing over the humiliating and disastrous fact
that the civilian producer of the national income, after he had been
fleeced once by the Imperial inland revenue authorities to pay for a vast
increase in the Imperial military establishment, was now exposed to the
additional affliction of being fleeced for a second time by barbarian
raiders whom the Diocletianic new-model army could not, after all,
prevent from ravaging the Empire's heartlands. 2

This attempt to solve the problem of defence by an improvement in
organization, which was such a brilliant failure in the military history of
the Diocletianic Roman Empire, had brought in better returns to
Powers burdened with anti-barbarian frontiers in a Modern Western
World. General Sir C. C. Monro’s lightning victory over the Afghans
in a . d . 1919 was a triumph of organization in a sudden emergency;
Marshal Lyautey’s gradual pacification of the Atlas highlands between
a . d . 1907 and a . d . 1934 3 was a still more signal triumph of organization
applied to the deliberate execution of a long-term plan; and these are
merely two illustrations out of a multitude lying ready to the historian’s
hand. In the policy of Modem Western imperial governments, however,
the resort to organization as a means of redressing an unfavourably
inclining balance in the defence of a limes was overshadowed by the
resort to technique in an age when Western technology was advancing
at an unprecedented pace into a previously undreamed-of wonderland of
scientific discover}’ and practical ‘know-how’.

In such circumstances the Western parties to the conflict between
Civilization and Barbarism might well feel confident of being able to set
so hot a pace in the progressive application of technology to border war¬
fare that their barbarian competitors would find themselves run off their

* On p. 25. above.

1 This is the burden of Zosimus’s critique of the Diocletianic reorganization of the
Roman system of imperial defence (see VI. vii. 320, n. 6).

J Marshal Lyautey himself retired in a.d. 1925, nine years before his work was com¬
pleted by his successors; but the credit for the whole achievement morally belongs to

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 29
feet. If the barbarian had shown himself able to procure from abroad
and even passably imitate at home a relatively simple product of the
Modern Western technique, such as an up-to-date breach-loading rifle,
was it not the obvious retort for his Western adversary to raise the
technological level of competition in armaments from small-arms to
artillery, from fire-arms to the aeroplane, and—in terms of the release of
atomic energy—from the non-fissile to the fissile type of explosive for
the manufacture of bombs? For, even if the barbarian could procure
aeroplanes from abroad and could learn to become as skilful an air-pilot
as he had already become a marksman, it was hardly conceivable that he
could provide for the servicing of aeroplanes, not to speak of installing
the plant for manufacturing them, and it was virtually out of the ques¬
tion for him to procure atom bombs from abroad, and quite out of the
question for him to acquire and apply the ‘know-how’ of manufacturing
them and detonating them. When Western Man had crowned a century
of scientific achievement by discovering how to harness atomic energy
to the service of War, it looked indeed as if it now lay in his power (if he
could reconcile this with his conscience) literally to annihilate the last
surviving rearguards of Barbarism in their last remaining pockets of
unsubdued territory—always supposing that these condemned barbarian
prisoners of a ubiquitous industrial Western Civilization were not
reprieved, after all, by seeing the Western masters of the World destroy
one another first in an atomic fratricidal warfare.

This thesis that technique is a winning card in Civilization’s hand is
forcefully presented in a passage from the pen of a brilliant observer of a
campaign in which a Modern Western Power overthrew a barbarian
opponent on his own ground by bringing into action against him the
Western technique of the Pre-Atomic Age.

‘Haifa is nearly four hundred miles from the Atbara; yet it was the
decisive point of the campaign; for in Haifa was being forged the deadliest
weapon that Britain has ever used against Mahdism—the Sudan Military
Railway. In the existence of the railway lay all the difference between the
extempore, amateur scrambles of Wolscley’s campaign and the machine-
like precision of Kitchener’s. When Civilisation fights with Barbarism it
must fight with civilised weapons; for with his own arts on his own ground
the barbarian is almost certain to be the better man. To go into the Sudan
without complete transport and certain communications is as near mad¬
ness as to go with spears and shields. Time has been on the Sirdar’s side,
whereas it was dead against Lord Wolseley; and of that, as of every point
in his game, the Sirdar has known how to ensure the full advantage. There
was fine marching and fine fighting in the campaign of the Atbara; the
campaign would have failed without them; but without the railway there
could never have been any campaign at all. The battle of the Atbara was
won in the workshops of Wady Haifa.’ 1

By thus availing himself of a modem Western technology's earliest
achievement in the field of mechanical transport, a British general who
had been trained as a military engineer was able, in a.d. 1898, to re¬
conquer, in little more than six months, an Eastern Sudan whose war-

1 Stcevenj, G. W.: With Kitchener to Khartum (Edinburgh and London 1898, Blade-
wood), chap. 3, ad init., pp. 22-23.

30 HEROIC AGES

like barbarian denizens, in a.d. 1881-5, had thrown off a sixty-years-old
Egyptian domination and had signally defeated the hazardously amateur
efforts which Egypt’s British conquerors had made at the eleventh hour
to salvage a crumbling Egyptian regime without having time to employ
those scientific methods by which Kitchener was subsequently to retrieve
his predecessors’ disastrous failures. This victory of a British-built rail¬
way over the Madhist barbarians of the Eastern Sudan in a.d. 1898 had
been anticipated by the victory of a Russian-built railway over the
Turkmen barbarians of Transcaspia in a.d. 1873-86,' and that triumph
of Western technique in the hands of Orthodox Christian converts to a
Western technological civilization was still more impressive than its sub¬
sequent emulation by the countrymen of George Stevenson, who might
have been expected to be the first in the field in any application of a
technical device that was an English invention.

A generation later, when this Western feat of harnessing steam-power
had been eclipsed by the more extraordinary feat of harnessing atomic
energy, it was a temptation for Western minds to assume that the prob¬
lem of anti-barbarian frontiers had now been solved decisively by the
progress of Western technology up to date. At the time of writing, how¬
ever, atomic energy had not yet been used for the destruction of either
Barbarism or Civilization; and the recent experience of Western Powers
in trying to offset their barbarian opponents’ skill in adapting the use of
Modem Western weapons and tactics to the local terrain by bringing
into action, on their own side, additional Modern Western weapons, of
ever more elaborate kinds, had demonstrated that the elaboration of
technique, like the elaboration of organization, carried with it certain
inherent drawbacks in addition to the untoward social effect of its
crushingly heavy cost to the tax-payer and the untoward educational
effect of its initiation of the barbarian into the ever more formidable
tricks of his civilized adversary’s trade. 1 These inherent drawbacks to
an elaboration of technique might go far towards neutralizing even the
military effect of this expedient for redressing the balance of power
between Civilization and Barbarism along a static limes.

These limitations upon the effectiveness of Technology as one of
Civilization’s weapons against Barbarism are illustrated by the history
of the Waziristan campaign of a.d. 1919-20. At the opening of these
operations ‘the efficiency of the troops in India had sunk to a lamentably
low ebb,’ 3 and 'it became manifest, soon after the expedition set out, that
there was no alternative but to rely on a liberal employment of artillery
and on a lavish expenditure of ammunition and of engineer stores to
counterbalance the initial lack of skill displayed by the troops’. 4 In this
campaign, in the end, ‘the aeroplane, the howitzer, the gun, and the

' See V. V. 223, n. 3, and p. 139, below.

* .‘The development of any strategic perception or of a more far-seeing or reasoned
leading among the frontier tribes is perhaps improbable. On the other hand, should
any such tendencies creep into their conduct of war, and should the tribesmen ever,
by any chance, be supported by skilled advice, or find themselves in the possession of
efficient artillery, numerous machine guns or stocks of grenades and analogous adjuncts
of war, the prospect of entering on a campaign of this nature without highly trained
troops is not alluring' (dc Watteville, op. cit., p. 210).

* Ibid. * Ibid., p. 91.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 3 *
grenade’ duly ‘redressed the balance’ 1 which had been inclined in the
Mahsud barbarian’s favour by his superiority to the British Indian
soldier in individual prowess as a fighting-man using a Modem Western
rifle on his own intractable ground. But the British expeditionary force’s
dependence on an elaborate equipment proved a source of weakness in
two respects. In the first place, ‘under conditions where the capacity of
the transport constitutes a dominant factor, the greater the skill and
mobility of the troops, the smaller the amount of stores and of transport
required, and the greater the resultant freedom of action in the conduct
of the operations.’ 2 The British expeditionary force’s dependence on
equipment tied it by the leg, 3 and in the second place the military
advantage purchased at this high cost in loss of mobility was at a mini¬
mum on this terrain. ‘The tactical methods permissible in the great
struggle in Flanders’ did not ‘turn out appropriate to the nature of
Indian mountain warfare’. 4

‘Where large masses can be used, where artillery and high explosive
predominate, certain tactical processes of a rather crude nature can be
employed, and the training of the individual can remain more elementary.
... But on the Indian frontier the case is very different. In mountain war¬
fare, as it still remains in spite of all progress achieved in modem military
equipment, numbers will rarely be present, while the enemy is particularly
expert in the use of ground and of the rifle. Those who attack such a
formidable fighting man, over terrain of his own choosing, must be able
to compete with him individually on more or less level terms. Otherwise
the handicap becomes too great. . . . The soldier required for frontier
warfare must be trained for the end in view. 5 . . . The incidents of the
campaign of 1919-20 . . . prove in the most unmistakable fashion the
value, or rather the absolute necessity, of a very high standard of in¬
dividual training among all combatant troops employed in a mountain
expedition.’ 6

The Barbarians' Military Elusiveness and Economic Parasitism

The technique which thus proved to be no adequate substitute for
personal skill and prowess on the civilized belligerent’s side had a
further drawback that was still more disconcerting: its hammer-blows
were apt to beat the air 7 without inflicting any decisive damage on a tar¬
get which was as elusive and intangible as the armaments brought to
bear against it were unwieldy.

While, at the time of writing, it seemed possible, as has been sug¬
gested, 8 that the recent Western invention of the atom bomb might
prove physically capable of eliminating once for all a pocket of un¬
subdued Barbarism, even in trackless mountain country, by literally
annihilating all life within the recalcitrant area, it was perhaps doubtful
whether even this tremendous weapon, however ruthlessly employed,

» Ibid., p. 208. J Ibid., p. 91.

> Sec Toynbee, A. J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1925, vol. i (London 1927,
Milford), pp. 557 - 3 . 4 de Watteville, op. cit., p. 209.

s Ibid., p. 209. 6 Ibid., p. 208.

r The civilized belligerent’s difficulty in deciding upon hu military objective—not
to speak of attaining it when it has been fixed—is touched upon in dc Watteville, op.
cit., pp. 89 and 166. s On p. 30, above.

32 HEROIC AGES

could exterminate the Nomad barbarians of Arabia and the Sahara who
were still eluding effective control by the sedentary Powers that were
their nominal sovereigns. The taming of these Afrasian Nomads had
been facilitated, as we have seen, 1 by the pre-atomic Western invention
of mechanically driven vehicles whose caterpillar tracks could carry them
over mud and sand; but the Nomad denizen of the Steppe enjoyed a
social advantage in his contest with a sedentary antagonist which could
not be impaired by any technical change in the conditions of warfare
on his terrain. In the past, this Nomad type of transfrontier barbarian
had notoriously been the most difficult for the Power behind the limes
to cope with, because he was unhampered by the possession of immov¬
able property, so that his civilized assailant had no definite objective at
which to aim and no power of bringing this mobile enemy to battle by
threatening some fixed asset of his which he could not afford to leave
undefended. The classical exposition of this invincible elusiveness of
the Nomad is given in Herodotus’s account of the Achaemenian empire-
builder Darius the Great’s unsuccessful attempt to incorporate in his
dominions the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe by subduing
its Scythian rangers of that day. After marching and counter-marching
over the face of the Steppe without coming any nearer to bringing the
Scythians to battle,

'Darius sent a despatch-rider to the King of the Scythians, I dan thyrsus,
with the following message: "You are a queer fellow! I cannot under¬
stand why you keep perpetually on the run when you have two alternatives.
If you consider yourself a match for my force, for God’s sake stop this
dodging, stand your ground, and fight; but, if you know in your heart
that you are outclassed, then, if that is the position, again I say: for God’s
sake stop trekking, bring me offerings of earth and water as acknowledg¬
ments that I am your lord and master, and then we can start talking."
Idanthyrsus’s answer to this overture was as follows: "Master Persian,

I will put my cards on the table. Never in my life have I run away from
anybody out of fear—never in the past, and not now from you. What you
have found me doing now is exactly what I habitually do in peace-time;

I have made no change. And now I will explain, too, why I do not
promptly give you battle. The reason is that we possess neither cities
that we might be afraid of your capturing nor plantations that we might
be afraid of your cutting down, so there is nothing to push us into fighting
a pitched battle with you. But, if you really have to be in such a hurry to
seek a decision, let me tell you that we do have tombs in which our
ancestors lie buried. Now, just you find those tombs and try to desecrate
them, and then you will discover whether we shall fight you for those
tombs or not. Short of that, we shall not engage you unless we see reason
for doing so.’*

While the Nomad herdsman on the Steppe thus provides a classical ’
illustration of the transfrontier barbarian’s elusiveness, the sedentary
highlander barbarian’s way of life neutralizes the effect of the elaborate
weapons of Civilization to a hardly lesser degree by the same retort of
denying them an adequate target. It is true that the sedentary barbarian

1 On p. 19, above.

* Herodotus: Book IV, chaps. 116-7.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 33
has given some vulnerable hostages to Fortune. The Power behind the
limes may retaliate for the wild highlander’s raids into imperial territory
by destroying the offending war-band’s villages and burning its crops;
and in the Air Age the champions of Civilization could take these
punitive measures without having to follow the toilsome and risky
traditional course of marching an expeditionary force on foot into the
highlander’s fastness. They could send over a few aircraft to do, in a few
minutes, without hazard to themselves, a stint of destruction that might
have cost a ground-force weeks of fighting and hundreds of casualties;
yet nothing is gained by any improvement in the technical means of
executing a military operation when the operation itself is intrinsically
futile in the sense of being ineffective for producing its intended political
result; and punitive measures against even a sedentary transfronticr
barbarian are apt to achieve the very opposite of their purpose—which
is to turn a brigand into a good neighbour.

Depriving the barbarian of one season’s crop is an ineffectual measure
of coercion so long as the barbarian himself lives to raise another crop
next year (as he will, unless the work of destruction is repeated annually);
and burning or bombing his house is likewise ineffectual when he is
capable of rebuilding this crude structure of wattle and daub, or of un¬
hewn stones plastered over with mud, with his own hands in one winter,
during spare months in which he can neither work in the fields nor go on
the war-path.' This capacity of his for quickly repairing, by self-help,
any material damage inflicted on him by the fortunes of war is one
example of a general social ‘law’ that we have encountered in another
context. 2 In warfare between antagonists that arc not on an equality in
their level of civilization, the more highly civilized belligerent is apt to
win victories that are pyrrhic because they leave the victor exhausted,
while his less highly civilized opponent is apt to suffer defeats that arc

« As the writer was penning these lines, he was having a vivid recollection of two
meetings of his with a Turkish peasant in a village in Western Anatolia. When this
kindly Turk first gave the writer hospitality in his house in the winter of A.D. 1920-1,
the house and the whole village were intact, and, when the same host gave the same guest
hospitality for the second time in the spring of a.d. 1923, he again had a house in which
to receive a visitor, and this house was again surrounded by a cluster of other simple
houses of the kind. If the visitor had not happened to know that, since his previous visit,
the whole village had been rased to the ground in the last phase of the Graeco-Turkish
war of a . d . 1919-22, he would never have guessed that the house in which he was being
received on this second occasion was not physically the same house that had given him
a night’s shelter before. The change that was manifest even to a foreigner's eye was not
the loss and replacement of the house but the difference in the spirits of its owner. On
the first occasion the Turkish householder had been patently depressed by the ex¬
perience of living under enemy occupation—the village being at that time on the Greek
side of a Graeco-Turkish military’ front. On the second occasion, which was after the
eventual Greek ddbficle, the village was free and the householder’s spirits were high.
'All is well now-, you see’, he said. 'Those Greek soldiers are not here any longer. Yes,
they burnt the village before they left, and my house with the rest—the house in which
I had the pleasure of entertaining you last time you were passing this way. But, you see,
we all built new houses for ourselves last winter, and now we have done our spring
sowing, so the damage has been repaired and—we are also free men once more.’

The material standard of life in this West Anatolian Turkish village, which seemed
primitive to a West European eye, would have seemed lordly to a contemporary Kurd
from Dcrsim or Mahsud from Waiiristan; and thus the ability of this Turkish village
community to reconstruct the material basis of its life in a single season gives the measure
of the Kurd’s and the Pathan's capacity for economic recuperation on their own lower
economic level. « In IV. iv. 393-4.

B 2898. vui

34 HEROIC AGES

inconclusive because of the recuperative power that is Nature’s com¬
pensation for the handicap of backwardness in organization.

The operation of this law as between the East Roman Empire and
Bulgaria in the tenth and eleventh centuries of the Christian Era proved
to be the key to the subsequent collapse of the victor and revival of his
victim, and we noticed in this connexion how, in the General War of
a . d . 1914-18 and its immediate sequel, a highly organized Germany
remained prostrate owing to the exhausting effect of her barren victories
long after a relatively primitive Turkey and Russia had managed to take
the field again notwithstanding their recent shattering defeats. The same
‘law’ can be seen at work in the warfare between transfrontier barbarians
and the Power behind the limes. So long as the people themselves are not
physically annihilated—and a transfrontier barbarian has the proverbial
nine lives of a cat—the barbarian belligerent cannot be brought to heel
by destroying his rudimentary and readily replaceable property. So far
from being an effective sanction, this punitive destruction of property
has the effect of confirming him in the predatory way of life from which
it is intended to deter him; for if the barbarian is exasperated—and,
still more, if he is both exasperated and starved through being deprived
by hostile military action of the product of even the modicum of peaceful
handiwork that he has still been carrying on side by side with a guerrilla
warfare that has already become his major occupation—the double
pressure of necessity and resentment will move him more than ever to
look for his livelihood to the deeds of war instead of to the works of
peace.

A consciousness of this ‘boomerang’ effect of punitive action perplexed
the British guardians of the North-West Frontier of India during the
last chapter of their stewardship.

‘In common with all other peoples in a similar stage of social develop¬
ment, the Mahsuds possessed no organic centres, the destruction of which
could so far impair their economic or social welfare as would infallibly
bring them to their knees. Makin, one of their main centres of population,
in addition to countless other villages, had been devastated during pre¬
vious campaigns by way of punitive retaliation, yet such measures had
never effectually put an end to their perennial acts of brigandage. Fines
had been levied, but the tribesmen had continued to retrieve such losses
by plundering their weaker neighbours. Rifles had been confiscated (!),
yet in the end this measure seemed only to encourage further thefts and
murders in order to replace the (not numerous) surrendered weapons.
There is a point beyond which reprisals cannot be carried without pro¬
voking undue exasperation or else bringing the subjects of this treatment
to partial starvation, unless, indeed, the regular forces imitate the Ger¬
mans when they methodically drove the Hottentots into the Omaheke
Desert—there to die of thirst. But on the [North-West] Frontier [of
India], even apart from the ethical side of the question, such action is not
practicable. . .. The success of any punitive expedition is best gauged by
the permanence of the moral impression which it leaves on the un¬
civilised mind. ... In the case of the Mahsuds, punitive expeditions had
failed to cause the desired moral impression for any length of time. ,,

« de Watte ville, op. dt., pp. 92-93.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 35

The ineffectiveness of the expedient of destroying a recalcitrant bar¬
barian’s property was indeed demonstrated afresh in the Waziristan
campaign of a.d. 1919-20 when a British column at last reached the
Mahsud ‘town’ of Kaniguram at the cost of nearly twelve weeks’ march¬
ing and fighting.

‘Previous history . . . lends colour to the belief that the Mahsuds were
convinced that the Striking Force had now nearly achieved its worst; it
might still destroy Kaniguram, but must then retire. These things had
happened before, and in any case would not very deeply affect any but
the inhabitants of the place itself. The rifles would thus remain, while
raiding and looting would eventually make good the losses incurred by
the tribesmen during the campaign.’ 1

'Much the same difficulty was to be experienced at Wana as had been
encountered at Kaniguram.... The destruction of towers and of principal
houses belonging to those sections [of the Wana Wazirs] known to be
hostile was then taken in hand. But such measures did not appear to
accelerate the rate of payment of the fine or of surrender of rifles. . . .
Moreover, the majority of the more distant tribal sections, inhabiting
districts bordering on Afghanistan, are virtually nomads owning no landed
property, no dwellings, nor crops. They wander among the mountains of
Waziristan and can take refuge across the Afghan border if hard pressed.
The problem of bringing these people to submission seemed insoluble.’ 2

The fact is that punitive measures defeat their own object by ac¬
centuating an already prevalent tendency in the transfrontier barbarian’s
social evolution which is precisely what has made him such an awkward
neighbour. 3 If the transfronticr barbarian had remained an unmodified
primitive man living in the static Yin-state in which the genuinely
primitive societies were found as far back in Time as the existing evidence
carried a twentieth-century Western historian’s knowledge of them, a
decidedly greater proportion of his total energies would have been
devoted to the arts of peace and a correspondingly greater coercive effect
would have been produced upon him by the punitive destruction of the
products of his pacific labours. The tragedy of a ci-devant primitive
society’s moral alienation from an adjoining civilization by which it has
previously been attracted is that the consequent deterioration of their
relation from one of progressive cultural radiation-and-mimesis to one of
chronic hostilities leads the barbarian to neglect his former peaceful
avocations in order to specialize in the art of border warfare—first in self-
defence, in order to save himself from subjugation or annihilation at the
hands of a civilization that has turned savage, and later—when his growth
in military efficiency on his own terrain has gradually reversed the balance
of military advantage in his favour—as an alternative means of making
his livelihood. To plough and reap vicariously with sword and spear 4 is
more lucrative for the barbarian now that a civilization which has been
thrown on the defensive can be mulcted of its wealth by way of either
loot or subsidies, and this is also more congenial to him now that the

* Ibid., p. 16s. „ . 2 Ibid., pp. 175-6.

* Thi* distinctive social evolution of the transfrontier barbarian has been touched
upon, by anticipation, in V. v. 230-3, apropos of its reflection in the field of religion.

« See Gilbert Murray’s translation of the song of Hybrias—an heir of barbanan Greek
conquerors of a Minoan Crete—in III. iii. 87, n. 1.

36 HEROIC AGES

barbarian has become a warrior first and foremost and has remained only
secondarily a husbandman. The barbarian adjoining a limes thus ceases
to be economically self-supporting and becomes an economic parasite
on the civilization on the other side of the military front. 1

A classical illustration of this characteristic economic regression of the
estranged barbarian proselyte of a disintegrating civilization is afforded
by Tacitus’s description of the German denizens of the barbarian
‘reservoir’ adjoining the Continental European times of the Roman

1 While this economic retrogression of the barbarian in a ‘reservoir’ dammed back
by a limes is one of the general effects of the erection of a timet in any physical environ¬
ment, the effect naturally varies in degree in proportion to the extent of the difference
between the regions segregated from one another by the limes in point of relative
economic attractiveness or unattractiveness. Es'idently the ‘reservoir’ barbarian will be
the more prone to seek his livelihood by plundering his civilized neighbour’s garden
than to seek it by cultivating his own wilderness, the more forbidding the wilderness is,
and the more smiling the garden. A case in point is the poverty of the Pathan highlands
bv comparison with the adjoining lowlands of Afghanistan as well as Pakistan (see
Toynbee, A. J.: Survey 0/ International Affairs, 1925, vol. 1 (London 1927, Milford),

PP Tis of some importance, because one of the considerations that are apt to
decide an empire-builder to draw- his limes along a particular line, short of haying
reached ‘a natural frontier’, is that, along this line, he has found himself at the limit of
the area that he can reckon on being able to exploit economically, with profit to himself,
by means of the economic technique of which he is master—at whatever stage of techno¬
logical ‘know-how’ he may happen to be at the time when he is choosing the line for
his limes. This last qualification has to be added because a country-side that is econo¬
mically profitable for a society at one level of economic technique may be economically
unprofitable for a society at another level. For the Romans round about the beginning
of the Christian Era it was economically unprofitable to saddle themselves cither with
North European territories in which the post-glacial forest still had the upper hand over
a primitive agriculturist’s attempts to clear it, or with an Arabian desert which the
sedentary husbandman could never hope to dispute with the stock-breeding Nomad.
Accordingly the Romans drew their European limes just short of the coal-deposits in
the Ruhr, and their Syrian limes short of the oil-deposits in Arabia.

The Romans did not live to regret this economic blindness of theirs, since their empire
came and went before the technique for turning coal and mineral oil to economic
account was discovered by the latter-day children of a Western Civilization sprung
ire’s ruins. On the other hand, there were Modem Western

from the Roman

had lightheartedly disinterested themselves, in the belief that they were valueless, turn
out to be of inestimable economic value in terms of new technological discoveries. The
Powers more or less interested in a latter-day Arabia had no sooner completed the de¬
limitation of frontiers in that peninsula after the General War of a . d . 1914-18 than they
were made aware, by the subsequent pioneer work of Western oil-prospectors, that
the sub-soil of the deserts which they had been dividing between them by drawing
imaginary straight lines on a small-scale non-gcological map was oozing with oil. An
equally undreamed-of wealth of oil had likewise belatedly been discovered to underlie
the surface of lands in the eastern part of the State of Oklahoma that had become the
property of Indians descended from ‘the five civilized nations’ who had been relegated
there since A.D. 1825 in the belief that, for the White Man, this was the least desirable
piece of country within the whole vast area of the United States. In A.D. 19*2 there was
a strange irony in the contrast between the respective current economic values of these
oil-lands in Oklahoma, to which ‘the five nations’ had been deported, and {he cotton-
lands in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, from which they had been evicted. A simi¬
lar reflection was suggested at the same date in England by the grass-clad solitudes
that had replaced, on the Downs, the cultivation which the Roman had once found
there in an age when the forest-clad plains of Britain were as inaccessible to the Celtic
husbandman as the forest-clad plains of North America were to the Indian hunter at
the time of the arrival of the White Man in the New World.

On the morrow of a latter-day Western discovery of the technique of splitting the
atom of one particular chemical clement, it looked as if a revaluation of the planet’s
wealth in terms of uranium instead of gold might produce even more sensational
surprises; and such surprises were bound to evoke correspondingly poignant regrets in
the hearts of the makers of frontiers in a politically divided society embracing the entire
surface of the globe.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 37
Empire at a date by which this limes had been in existence for about a
century and a half and had therefore had time to produce a limes’
typical social effects. Tacitus affirms 1 that cattle is the Germans’ sole
form of wealth; but the relative unimportance of agriculture in the
German economy of that day, which is implied in this and other
passages of the Roman observer’s work, cannot have been due to
ignorance or even to inexperience.

'Archaeological investigation has now proved that the cultivation of
cereals in the North of Europe goes back to the Stone Age. Of still greater
importance is the discovery of the representation of a plough with two
oxen among the rock-carvings at Tcgncby in Bohusliin, which date from
the Bronze Age. However sceptical one may feel towards the dates fixed
by archaeologists, this discovery shows without doubt that a highly de¬
veloped system of agriculture was practised in Sweden before the begin¬
ning of the Christian Era. Some other explanation of the accounts given
by Caesar and Tacitus must therefore be found. What the true explana¬
tion is has been clearly shown by a careful examination of the various
passages in which these writers refer to the subject. 1 The growth of the
military spirit had led to a neglect of agriculture, as both writers 5 expressly
state.’ 4

This interpretation of the unimportance of agriculture 'in the
economy of those Germans who were within range of Roman observa¬
tion in Tacitus’s day as being evidence, not of an infantile economic
backwardness, but of a recent economic relapse from a higher pristine

1 Tacitus: Germania, chap. 5.

* ‘During the interval* between bouts of war, (the Germans] spend a little of their
time in hunting, but most of it in doing nothing. They give themselves up to sleeping
and eating, and it is precisely the bravest and most warlike of them that are the most
idle. They lea% - e it to the women, the old men, and the unfit members of the family to
look after the home, the household, and the field*, while the warriors laze. It is a curious
incongruity in their character that they should so love sloth and at the same time *o
hate tranquility' (Tacitus: Germania, chap. 15).

J Whereas Tacitus attributes thi* neglect of agriculture to the Germans in general,
without distinguishing in this matter between one Teutonic people and another, Caesar
(Bellum GaUieum, Book IV, chap, i; cp. Book VI, chap. 22) attributes it to the Suebi
in particular. The method, here ascribed by Caesar to the Suebi, of moving their quar¬
ter* every year and never cultivating the same piece of land a second time was remi¬
niscent of the primitive agriculture which Modern Western observers had seen prac¬
tised by Mayas in Yucatan (see II. ii. 418) and by Bantu peoples in Tropical Africa
(see II. ii. 20-7). The Suebi were more remote from the Roman //met than the kindred
Teutonic peoples to the west of them, and the explanation of their slovenliness in
agriculture as being an effect of the limes is proportionately less convincing. At the same
time, the hypothesis that they were recent initiates into the art of agriculture is un¬
tenable, in view of the fact that agriculture was long since well established among their
northern neighbours in Scandinavia and their north-eastern neighbours in Estonia.
A possible alternative explanation is suggested by a passage in Strabo ( Gtographiea ,
Book VII, chap, i, § 3, p. C 291) in which this Hellenic observer in the next generation
after Caesar's ascribes to the Suebi a way of life which is not that of primitive cultivators
but is that of the Eurasian Nomad stock-breeders. In Caesar’s and Strabo’s day the
Suebi lived in a region between the south-eastern comer of the Baltic Sea and the north¬
western shore of the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe which, in the sub¬
sequent map of Western Christendom, was to be occupied by Lithuania ar.d Poland;
and the local Polish and Lithuanian variety of a Western culture was to be marked Iv
affected by the radiation of cultural influences from an adjoining Nomadic World.
Might not the Suebi have previously succumbed, in the same habitat, to the same
influences from the same quarter?—A.J.T.

4 Chadwick, H. M.: The Origin of the English Nation (Cambridge 1907, University
Press), pp. 286-7. The quotations from this book have been made with the permission
of the publishers.

38 HEROIC AGES

state, is confirmed by Tacitus’s own observation that the Ests (Aestii)—
who were living then, as now, on the eastern seaboard of the Baltic—
‘cultivate cereals and the other fruits of the Earth with an assiduity that
stands out in contrast to the typical German sloth’. 1 The habitat of these
virtuous Estonian husbandmen lay to the north-east of the Teutonic
peoples’ domain and was thus at a farther remove from the birthplace
of agriculture somewhere in South-Western Asia. In travelling from
Asia into Europe round the head of the Great Western Bay of the
Eurasian Steppe, which was the western tip of Nomad’s Land, the
technique of agriculture could have reached Estonia only by way of
Germany, and the German peoples who had passed the art on to the
Ests must once have been not less good husbandmen than the Ests still
were when they were observed by Tacitus’s informants. When we ask
ourselves why Tacitus’s Ests should have retained their hold on agri¬
culture while Tacitus’s Germans had lost theirs, the obvious answer is
that, by comparison with Tacitus’s Germans, the Ests were remote, not
only from the South-East Asian birthplace of the ancient invention of
agriculture, but also from the Central European location of a recently
established limes of the Roman Empire. While the Germans adjoining
this limfis had had their lives turned upside-down by the experience of
living at close quarters with it, the Ests had been left still high and dry
on the farther side of the ‘reservoir’ which the erection of the limes had
created. The Ests were still industriously practising agriculture for the
same reason that explains why the Suebi, Goths, and Swedes were still
remaining loyal to a patriarchal form of kingship, in contrast to the
political instability which the south-western Germans in the recently
created ‘reservoir’ had been exhibiting when they had abandoned this
same traditional form of government, first for an Hellenic-inspired olig¬
archy and latterly for the likewise Hellenic-inspired dictatorship of a
war-lord backed by his war-band.*

Moreover, there is evidence that these north-eastern Germans out
of range of the Roman limes had preserved not only their pristine politi¬
cal institutions but also the pristine devotion to agriculture that was
characteristic of their eastern neighbours the Ests in Tacitus’s time.
When, some three or four hundred years later, the Germans in ‘the
reservoir’ adjoining the Roman limes at last broke through the dam and
flooded Gaul and Britain, the social and economic devastation which was
the first effect of this cataclysm was followed, after the human flood
waters had soaked into the social soil, by an economic advance that was
the reward of a new agricultural technique, and this new technique
had been introduced by the barbarian invaders. The Frankish and

1 Tacitus: Germania, chap. ^5, § 4.

* For the survival ot a primitive patriarchal monarchy among the Teutonic peoples
out of range of the Roman limes, see Dawson, Christopher: Religion and ike Rise of
Western Culture (London 1950, Sheed & Ward), pp. 70-8 x, as well as the present
Study, V. v. 213, n. 1—citing Chadwick, op. cit.,pp. 298-9 (a passage which is based
on Tacitus: Germania, chap. 44)—and V. vi. 230-2. The interpretation of the war-lord
in the barbarian ‘reservoir 1 as a counterpart of the Caesar on the other side of a limes
will be found in V. vi. 4, n. 4, and on p. ro, above. The general contrast between the
revolution that overtakes the transfrontier barbarians of 'the reservoir’ and the still
undisturbed life of the transreservoir barbarians in a Hyperborean ‘back of beyond’
has been noticed in II. ii. 315-22, and on p. 4, above.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 39
English war-bands brought with them into Northern Gaul and Eastern
Britain the potent mould-board plough which, in the course of the Dark
and Middle Ages, was to bring to fruition the latent fertility of heavy
North European soils which had been impervious to the light plough
used by Celts and Romans. Though, at the time of writing, Archaeology
had not yet detected exactly when or where in Northern Europe this
revolutionary technological invention had been made, it was manifest
that it could not have been introduced into the former north-western
provinces of the Roman Empire by transfronticr German invaders in the
fifth century of the Christian Era unless these economically regressive
barbarians had been able to learn—or re-leam—its use from north¬
eastern neighbours of theirs whose remoteness from a subversive Roman
limes had permitted them still to follow their traditional way of life in an
age in which the Germans in ‘the reservoir* had been demoralized by the
military frontier’s proximity.

A people that was still giving hostages to Fortune by still leading the
pristine agricultural sedentary life of the Ests and Swedes of Tacitus’s
day would evidently be more amenable than the elusive barbarians in
‘the reservoir’ to the punitive action of a ‘civilized’ Power employing
ponderous weapons; but the Power behind a limes has no quarrel with
Hyperboraeans who arc not only innocent of offence against its imperial
peace but are also insulated from any direct contact with its armed
forces by ‘the reservoir' that lies between the limes and ‘the back of
beyond’. The denizens of ‘the reservoir’ are the barbarians with whom
the Power behind the limes is in a state of chronic war, and in this war¬
fare the economic regression that is the reverse side of the ‘reservoir’
barbarians’ militarization is the trump card in their hand. Thanks to
this economic relapse, they have little material wealth to lose; and, hav¬
ing little to lose by war with the neighbouring civilization, they have
little to fear from the continuance of hostilities, or indeed from their
intensification.

The Self-Defeat of a Policy of Setting a Thief to Catch a Thief
This striking inequality in the material consequences of border war¬
fare for the two belligerents is reflected in a great and growing inequality
between them in moral. For the children of a disintegrating civilization
that is standing on the defensive—at any rate for a demilitarized majority
of them in the interior, as distinct from a barbarized minority in the
marches—the interminable border warfare with the barbarians beyond
the limes spells the burden of an ever-increasing financial charge and the
anxiety of a never solved military and political problem. For the bar¬
barian belligerent, on the other hand, the same warfare has the very
opposite psychological associations. For him it is not a burden but an
opportunity, not an anxiety but an exhilaration. A contest that is always
harassing for the civilized party—and utterly devastating for him when
he finds himself no nearer to being within sight of the end of it after he
has mobilized all his resources of organization and technique—is the
very breath of life for the militarized barbarian. This great and always

40 .. HEROIC AGES

increasing inequality in ‘psychological armament’ makes the discomfi¬
ture of the civilized belligerent inevitable sooner or later. 1

In this situation it is not surprising that the party who is both author
and victim of the limes should not resign himself to his doom without
trying a last expedient. If his own resources have proved disappointingly
inefficacious for redressing a balance that has been remorselessly inclin¬
ing against him, might he not be able to avert an otherwise manifest
destiny by enlisting his barbarian adversary’s disastrously demonstrated
prowess in a tottering civilization’s defence? If Brennus insolently threw’
his sword into the scale of Barbarism, why should not the scale of
Civilization be saved, at the eleventh hour, from kicking the beam by
deftly inserting into it the swords of a legendary Gallic barbarian’s living
Teuton, Sarmatian, Hun, and Arab counterparts?

This subtle policy of setting a thief to catch a thief might seem, indeed,
to have everything to recommend it. The barbarian warrior is the citizen
soldier’s superior in the art of border warfare because the barbarian is
fighting here on his own familiar ground; and he has come to be also
the citizen-soldier’s superior in personal prow r ess because he has
acquired a zest for the profession of arms which his adversary has lost.
This better military material can be purchased at a very much lower cost
to the citizen-taxpayer; 2 and this cheap conversion of an enemy warrior
into a friendly mercenary will doubly relieve the pressure on the limes
by reducing pari passu both the power of the ‘reservoir’ barbarian to take
the offensive and his incentive forgoing on the war-path. His power will

1 This difference in altitude towards the ordeal of War likewise comes to light be¬
tween parties who are sundered from one another by a less deep and less sharply cut
psychological gulf than that which divides the transfronticr barbarians from the Power
behind the limes.

In the summer of a.d. 1914, for example, the outbreak of war in Europe was taken
more tragically by the peoples of the West than it was by the Serbs—though the Serbs
had only just emerged from two successive Balkan Wars and were being called upon,
this time, to face, not just Turkey or Bulgaria, but the overwhelmingly superior power
of Austria-Hungary. Vet the Serbs were less dismayed by the prospect of this third war
against enormous odds than they were exhilarated by the hope of this time being able
—at the price of a holocaust—to complete the achievement of their national aspirations.

The same spirit had been displayed repeatedly by the Poles, who were culturally
much closer akin than the Serbs were to the Western Europeans. During the Peace
Conference of a.d. 19x9 a friend of the writer’s, Mr. Laurence Hammond, who was in
Paris for the occasion as the special correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, was
talking one day about the peace settlement to a member of the Polish Delegation with
a baffling sense that they were speaking at cross purposes. His Polish interlocutor must
have had the same feeling; for, in the middle of the conversation, he remarked on this
to the following effect: ‘The truth is that you and I are approaching these questions from
entirely different points of view. For you Westerners, as I have realized, the war that we
have just been through has been a hideous and disastrous break in the peace which
you have come to think of as being the normal condition of civilized life; and, in your
ideas about a peace settlement, the paramount consideration in your minds is to avoid
anything that might threaten to involve you in another catastrophe of the kind. If you
could not persuade yourselves that this last war was "a war to end war”, you would hardly
be able to face the future. We Poles look at things quite differently. For us. War, not
Peace, is the normal condition of life. We have been through many wars before this
last one, and we expect to have to go through many more; but this docs not dismay
us, and it certainly does not deter us from pressing our national claims. If we get what
we are asking for, I agree that this may well involve us in future wars with our neigh¬
bours; but, lor us, that is all in the day’s work. No doubt we shall again find ourselves
at war; no doubt we shall again suffer catastrophes that would seem crushing to you
English and French; and no doubt, in the next chapter of the story after that, there
will still be a Poland on the map.’

1 See p. 26, n. 1, above.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 4 x
be reduced because his forces will now be divided (and every enlisted
barbarian will count twice over in this redistribution of man-power,
since he will be leaving one warrior the less to Barbarism in bringing one
soldier the more to Civilization). At the same time the unenlisted bar¬
barian’s temptation to plunder his civilized neighbours will be appreci¬
ably diminished. Economic distress in a poverty-stricken and hitherto
over-populated ‘reservoir’ will be mitigated by an outflow of man-power
into the imperial forces on the other side of the limes and a consequent
inflow of remittances from these mercenary barbarian soldiers’ pay (a
payment for services rendered which is decidedly preferable, from the
Imperial Power’s point of view, to the humiliating subsidies or plunder¬
ings that are the only too familiar alternative ways of effecting a transfer
of purchasing-power which, in some form or other, is inevitable). If
nevertheless an insatiable cupidity should entice the non-enlistcd bar¬
barian warriors into reverting to their traditional malpractices, they will
now find themselves confronted, no longer by citizen-soldiers with no
stomach for fighting, but by barbarian mercenaries who may be expected
to give a good account of themselves—not only because they enjoy fight¬
ing and thirst for the fame that is the non-material reward of barbarian
military prowess, but also because they will now have property of their
own, on the civilized side of the limes, to defend against the covetous
hands of their still predatory kinsmen from beyond the pale.

This impressive consensus of considerations had frequently led the
rulers of universal states both to enlist transfronticr barbarian soldiers
in their standing armies and to plant transfronticr barbarian settlers on
the imperial side of the limes, in the marches or even in the interior.
These would-be measures of imperial defence have been examined
in other contexts, 1 and the details need not be recapitulated here. In
this place we need only recall our previous finding 2 that this alluring
expedient for averting a collapse of the limes actually precipitates the
catastrophe which it is designed to forestall, and we may proceed to in¬
quire into the explanation of this apparent paradox.

Part of the explanation is, of course, to be found in tire consideration
that, in taking "the barbarians into its service, the Power behind the times
is also taking them into its confidence and is thereby subjecting them to
an intensive course of instruction in a military and political ‘know-how’
which they can afterwards employ, if they choose, to their own profit at
their teachers’ expense.

'It can be said of the Roman, Chinese, and British Indian empires
alike that the method that worked best was one of enlisting the services
of the very tribes that were supposedly excluded by the boundary, thus
turning them about so that they faced away from the boundary- instead
of toward it. .. . Nevertheless, it was a method that haunted the imperial
state responsible for it, because it created a sword of two edges capable
of striking outward when held in a strong hand but of cutting inward
when the hand weakened. From border societies of this kind, linked with
boundary-maintaining empires, were drawn the ‘‘barbarian auxiliaries”

' In V. v. 4S9~8 o, especially pp. 4&0 and 464. and VI. vii. 335-8. See also Chadwick,
H. M.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 191a, University Press), p. 445.

s On pp. 12-13, above.

B 2808 .vm

C 2

42 HEROIC AGES

of Rome and the "tributary barbarians” of China; from a similar society
the British Empire in India recruits both regular troops and tribal levies.
From the same societies came invaders and conquerors of both Rome and
China; and the people of the same kind with whom the British now 1
deal arc as dangerous as they arc useful.’ 2

This last point is pertinently illustrated by a feature of the Waziristan
campaign of a.d. 1919-20.

‘The presence in Waziristan of not less than eighteen hundred fighting
men—consisting of deserters from the two militia forces and ex-soldiers
of the Indian Regular Army—who had received some form of British
training had familiarised the tribesmen with the most modern tactics in
rifle-fighting, and they now possessed sufficient stocks of ammunition to
employ these tactics effectively.’ 2

In the history of the Roman Empire’s long-drawn-out struggle to
arrest an inexorable inclination of the scales in the transfrontier barbar¬
ians’ favour, a comparable policy of enlisting barbarians to keep their
fellow barbarians at bay similarly defeated itself—if we are to believe a
hostile critic of the Emperor Theodosius I’s administration—by initiat¬
ing the barbarians into the Roman art of war and at the same time appris¬
ing them of the Roman Empire’s weakness.

‘In the Roman forces, discipline was now at an end, and all distinction
between Roman and barbarian had broken down. The troops of both
categories were all completely intermingled with one another in the
ranks; for even the register of the soldiers borne on the strength of the
military units was now no longer being kept up to date. The [barbarian]
deserters [from the transfrontier barbarian war-bands to the Roman
Imperial Army] thus found themselves free, after having been enrolled
in Roman formations, to go home again and send off substitutes to take
their place until, at their own good time, they might choose to resume
their personal service under the Romans. This extreme disorganization
that was thus now prevalent in the Roman military formations was no
secret to the barbarians, since—with the door thrown wide open, as it
had been, for intercourse—the deserters were able to give them full
intelligence. The barbarians' conclusion was that the Roman body politic
was being so grossly mismanaged as positively to invite attack.’ 4

When such well-instructed mercenaries change sides en masse, it is no
wonder that they arc often able to give the coup de grdee to a tottering
Power behind the limes, which has enlisted their services as a last resort.
But we have still to explain why they should be moved, as they so
frequently are, to turn against their employers. When once they have
been taken into the Imperial Power’s service, does not their personal
interest coincide with their professional duty r The regular pay that they
are now drawing from the Imperial Treasury is both more lucrative and
more secure than the plunder that they used to snatch at the risk of their
lives in occasional raids; the rich land assigned to them by the Imperial

1 This passage was written in or before a.d. 1940.—A.J.T.

1 Lattimore, O.: Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York 1940, American Geo¬
graphical Society), pp. 245-6.

1 Toynbee. A. J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1025. vol. i (London 1927, Milford),
p. 557- 4 Zoaimus: Histonae, Book IV, chap, xxxi, §§ 1-3.

THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 4 3
authorities inside the limes is an equally advantageous exchange for the
wretched land beyond the pale that was too poor to keep them alive if
they did not eke out its scanty produce by lifting crops and cattle, on
the civilized side of the limes, which are now theirs to enjoy by right.
Does not this change in their fortunes give them a stake in the survival
of the empire thanks to whose patronage the change has come about? If
they turn against the masters whom they have contracted to serve on
such favourable terms as these, are they not virtually inviting their kins¬
men who have stayed beyond the pale to scramble with them for benefits
that remain their own monopoly so long as they keep the limes inviolate ?
Why, then, turn traitor? Cui bono?

The single answer to all these questions is that, in turning against the
empire which he has been hired to defend, the barbarian mercenary
is indeed acting against his own material interests, but that in doing this
he is not doing anything peculiar. Man seldom behaves primarily as
homo economicus, and the behaviour of a transfrontier barbarian in the
service of the Power behind the limes is determined by an impulse that
is stronger than any economic considerations. The governing factor in
the situation is that the barbarian beyond the pale has long since become
estranged from a broken-down neighbouring civilization. This moral
breach between the two parties cannot be mended by a business deal—
however profitable to both sides the bargain may be. An unreconciled
estrangement will prevent the barbarian who has enlisted in the Im¬
perial Government’s service from being assimilated to the culture of
the society which he has contracted to defend by force of arms; and,
if enlistment will not lead to assimilation, the policy of enlistment cannot
succeed.

The truth is that, in enlisting the barbarian in its sendee, the Power
behind the limes is attempting, under altogether unpropitious psycho¬
logical conditions, to recapture the relation between Barbarism and Civi¬
lization that prevailed in days when the civilization had not yet broken
down and the limes had not yet come into existence. The defence of the
civilization by an inner ring of barbarians against an outer ring of bar¬
barians was something that happened of itself, without any contract
between the parties, so long as a growing civilization was attracting the
barbarians by its charm. Under these psychological conditions an inner
ring of barbarians served spontaneously both as a conductor through
which the civilization radiated its cultural influence into barbarian
societies at a farther remove and as a buffer which absorbed the shocks
of these outer barbarians’ attempts to take by force 1 a cultural kingdom
which, in its heyday, had for them the fascination of the Kingdom of
Heaven. In these happy psychological circumstances the inner barbarian
proselytes of one day became the cultural converts of the next, while
today’s outer barbarian assailants became tomorrow’s inner barbarian
proselytes. The growing civilization progressively extended its borders
through the successive assimilation of one ring after another of its
barbarian neighbours—a very different story from the subsequent
history of a broken-down civilization’s expansion by force, up to the

« Matt. xi. 12.

44 HEROIC AGES

limit to which sheer force could carry it, at the expense of barbarians
whom it lias ceased to charm.

The reason why, after the breakdown of the civilization and the
erection of the times, the enlisted barbarians do not remain loyal is that,
in the mercenary barbarian’s soul, his business contract with his
civilized employer is not underwritten by any desire to share in the
civilization which he has undertaken to defend in return for a material
quid pro quo. The direction of the current of mimesis has indeed, as we
have seen,* long since been reversed, and, so far from Civilization’s re¬
taining any prestige in the barbarian’s eyes, it is the barbarian who now
enjoys prestige in the eyes of the representative of Civilization.

‘Early Roman history has been described as the history of ordinary
people doing extraordinary things. In the Later Empire it took an extra¬
ordinary man to do anything at all, except carry on a routine, and, as the
Empire had for centuries devoted itself to the breeding and training of
ordinary men, the extraordinary men of its last ages—Stilicho, Aetius,
and their like—were increasingly drawn from the Barbarian World.’ 2

While Stilicho was a barbarian, and an exceptionally loyal one, in the
Roman Imperial service, Aetius was a barbarized Roman marchman; 3
and it was not only in the Roman Empire in extremis that this assimilation
of the marchman to the barbarian occurred. On the Central Asian times
of the Han Empire and its avatars, ‘in entering "un-Chinese” terrain the
Chinese had to modify or abandon their Chinese economy, thus weaken¬
ing their attachment to other Chinese’. 4 This reversal of the direction of
the current of mimesis is fatal for a policy of enlisting Barbarism in
Civilization’s defence. In these psychological circumstances a corps of
barbarian foederati will never turn into a unit of the Imperial Regular
Army; it will remain an unassimilated barbarian war-band retaining its
own weapons and tactics, taking its orders from its own war-lord, feeling
its own esprit de corps, nursing its own ambitions. In the same circum¬
stances a settlement of barbarian laeti 5 will never turn into a civil com¬
munity of imperial citizens; it will remain an unassimilated imperium in
imperio which, short of being annihilated, will find its political destiny
sooner or later in becoming the nucleus of a dissident successor-state. In
short, the policy of hiring barbarians to keep their kinsmen out is fore¬
doomed to failure; and, as this expedient is the last forlorn hope of the
tottering Power behind the limes, its failure is immediately followed by
the times' collapse.

1 In V. v. 459-80, and on pp. 14-15. above.

1 Collingwood, R. G., in Collingwood, R. G., and Myres, J. N. L.: Roman Britain
and the English Settlements, 2nd ed. (Oxford 1937, Clarendon Press), p. 307.

> See the passage quoted from Lot in V. v. 472.

* Lattimore, O.: Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York 1940, American Geo¬
graphical Society), pp. 243-4. Cp. the passage already quoted on p. 14. above.

* See VII. vi. 138-9.

D. THE CATACLYSM AND ITS
CONSEQUENCES

A Reversal of Roles

W HEN a barrage bursts, the whole body of water that has been
gradually accumulating in the reservoirabovc the dam runs violently
down a steep place into the sea 1 in the twinkling of an eye, and this
sudden release of a long-pent-up and ever-mounting force produces a
threefold catastrophe. In the first place the flood destroys the works of
Man in the cultivated lands below the broken barrage. In the second
place the potentially life-giving water that has made this devastating
passage pours into the sea and becomes lost in the sea-water’s saline
mass, without ever having served Man for his human purposes of irriga¬
tion or navigation or the generation of hydraulic power. In the third
place the discharge of the accumulated waters empties the artificial lake
above the barrage and leaves its margin high and dry, and this flight of
the waters from above the dam dooms the exotic vegetation which had
found an unexpected possibility of life at the stored-up water’s edge to
wither away without propagating its kind on a mountain-side that has now
relapsed into its pristine barrenness. In short, the waters which fructified
so long as the barrage held, make havoc everywhere, in the lands that
they lay bare as well as in those that they submerge, so soon as the burst¬
ing of the barrage releases them from the control which the existence of
the barrage had imposed upon them.

This episode in Man’s contest with Physical Nature is an apt simile
of what happens in Man’s struggle with Human Nature, in his neigh¬
bours and in himself, upon the collapse of the military barrage of a limes.
The resulting social cataclysm is a calamity for all concerned; but in the
human, as in the physical, disaster the incidence of the devastation is
unequal, and in this case likewise the distribution of the damage is the
reverse of what might have been expected a priori. There is, in fact, here
a paradoxical reversal of roles.® So long as the representatives of a
disintegrating civilization were successful in saving a tottering limes from
collapse, the tribulation which it cost them to perform this tour deforce
was progressively aggravated, as we have seen, 1 out of all proportion to
the progressive increase in the pressure exerted by the transfrontier
barbarians. On the other hand, now that the disaster, so long dreaded
and so long averted by the Power behind the limes, has at last duly
descended upon the doomed civilization’s devoted head, the principal
sufferers arc no longer the ex-subjects of the defunct universal state, over
whose fields and cities the deluge of barbarian invasion now rolls
unchecked, but the ostensibly triumphant barbarians themselves. The
hour of their triumph, for which they have thirsted so long, proves to be

« Matt. via. 32; Mark v. 13; Luke viii. 33. ..... . ...

a The play of this ironical motif in human affairs—for which Aristotle coined the
term wepurfrcia—has been discussed in IV. iv. 245-61.

J On pp. 12, 25-26, and 39-40, above.

46 HEROIC AGES

the occasion of a discomfiture which neither they nor their defeated
adversaries had foreseen.

The Demoralization of the Barbarian Conquerors

What is the explanation of this apparent paradox? The answer is that
the limes, whose resistance the transfrontier barbarian has been seeking
all the time to overcome, has served, not only as the bulwark of Civiliza¬
tion that its builders and defenders had intended it to provide against
an outer Barbarism, but also as a providential safeguard for the aggressive
barbarian himself against demonically self-destructive psychological
forces within his own bosom.

We have seen 1 that the proximity of a limes induces a malaise among
the transfrontier barbarians within range of it because their previously
primitive economy and institutions arc disintegrated by a rain of psychic
energy, generated by the civilization within the limes, that is wafted
across a barrier which is an obstacle to the fuller and more fruitful inter¬
course characteristic of the relations between a growing civilization and
the primitive proselytes beyond its open and inviting timen. We have also
seen 2 that, so long as the barbarian is confined beyond the pale, he
succeeds in transmuting some, at least, of this disturbing influx of alien
psychic energy into cultural products—political, artistic, and religious—
which are partly adaptations of institutions created by the civilization
from which the intrusive cultural influence comes, and partly new
creations of the barbarian’s own. This capacity for adaptation and even
creation, that is thus displayed by the barbarian while he is still beyond
the pale, is a symptom that the psychological disturbance to which he is
being exposed is being kept within bounds within which it can produce
a partially stimulating and not wholly demoralizing effect; and this
saving curb is provided by the existence of the very limes which the
barbarian is bent on destroying; for the limes, so long as it holds, supplies
a substitute, in some measure, for the indispensable discipline of which
Primitive Man is deprived when the breaking of his cake of primitive
custom 3 converts him into a transfronticr barbarian. This discipline is
partly imposed on him externally; for, so long as the perennial.border
warfare continues, the barbarian belligerent, whether his role be that of
raider, hostage, or mercenary, is being trained continually perforce in a
stern yet at the same time instructive military school; but the limes
disciplines him most effectively in the psychological sense of giving him
tasks to perform, objectives to reach, and difficulties to contend with
that call forth his highest powers and constantly keep his efforts up to
the mark.

When the sudden collapse of the limes sweeps this safeguard away, the
nascent creative powers that have been evoked in the transfrontier bar¬
barian by the challenge of the limes are daunted and defeated by being
called upon, suddenly and prematurely, to perform new tasks that arc
altogether too great and too difficult for them to cope with; and in this
hour of bewilderment, when there is no more spirit in them, 4 these frail

1 On pp. 4-9 and 35-39, above. _ * On pp. 9-1 r, above.

J See the phrase quoted from Bagehot in II. i. 192. * 2 Chron. ix. 4.

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 47
shoots of tender wheat are quickly stifled by the tares in the spiritual
field of the barbarian’s soul—his abandon 1 and his ferocity—which find
boundless opportunities for luxuriant growth now that the former raider
and mercenary has entered into his long-coveted kingdom. If the trans¬
frontier barbarian is a more brutal, as well as a more sophisticated, being
than his ancestor the primitive tribesman, the latter-day barbarian who
has broken through the limes and carved a successor-state out of the
derelict domain of a defunct universal state becomes differentiated from
his already barbarian predecessor beyond the pale in the same two senses
in a still higher degree. As soon as the barbarian has left no-man’s-land
behind him and set foot in a ruined world which is for him an earthly
paradise, his malaise rankles into demoralization. This demonic revolu¬
tion in the barbarian’s soul is illustrated by the spiritual catastrophe
which overtook the Scandinavians when they overran the Carolingian
Empire. 2 When, in the Viking Age, they tore their life up from its static
primitive roots and launched it into pure adventure, the price of an
excessive liberation was a fatal loss of balance. 1

'When the King’s hall was transplanted into a foreign country and his
luck plucked out of the fields and grazing grounds surrounding his manor,
life necessarily became a round of battles and drinking feasts.’ 4

In this exotic environment the barbarian’s previously manifest vices
become flagrant, and his previously latent vices become manifest.

For example, the tendency towards parasitism, 5 revealed in the bar¬
barian’s loss of grip upon the economic arts of peace through which his
primitive forebears earned their livelihood, 6 is kept in check, so long as
the limes stands, by the parasite’s finding himself compelled to pay by
fighting—either as a raider or as a mercenary set to catch the thief that
his brother has continued to be—for the living that he has ceased to
earn by productive labour. But this last shred of economic respectability
falls from the barbarian’s shoulders when his eventual acquisition of
provinces which he has plundered or policed in the past gives him an
effortless command over the wreckage of a civilization which, for him,
still amounts to fabulous wealth. Hybrias the unchallenged master of a
prostrate Minoan serfdom is a more odious parasite than Hybrias’
father, who had to snatch his booty or draw his pay from imperial Minos’
store at the cost of putting his own life in jeopardy.

Again, the tendency towards sloth which the transfrontier barbarian
already displays is, beyond the pale, likewise confined, as Tacitus

1 The passive way of behaviour, produced by schism in the soul, which we have
called abandon (alias aKparaa), has been discussed in V. v. 377 and 399-403.

1 See II. ii. 340-60.

3 Sec Grdnbcch. V.: Tht Culture of the Teutons (London 1931, Milford, 3 volt, in
a), vol8. ii-iii, pp. 304 “ 5 *

« Ibid., p. 305. .

» A hermit-crab, which is the arch-panuite, is the antithesis of a chrysalis; and this
contrast gives the measure of the Rulf between the barrenness of the External Prole¬
tariat and the creativity of the Internal Proletariat—considering that the role of chrysa¬
lis bridging the transition to an affiliated from an apparented civilization, which had
sometimes been played by churches created by internal proletariats, proves not to
have been more than an incidental deviation from a higher religion’s true calling (see
VII. vii. 392-4 19 >.

6 See pp. 35-381 above.

48 HEROIC AGES

observed, 1 to bouts of idleness spent in consuming a windfall acquired
in the warrior’s latest raid or latest term of mercenary service; and the
idler takes it for granted all the time that he will have to go on the war¬
path again as soon as his momentary gains have been spent—whereas the
barbarian master of a successor-state feels himself dispensed from living
from hand to mouth and joyfully lapses into vegetating as a boorish
sybarite, with no forebodings of a day of judgement on which the strong
man z who has thus heedlessly laid aside his arms may be despoiled of
his ill-gotten goods by a stronger than he—as the Vandals were over¬
taken by a Roman revanche and the Visigoths by the swoop of fellow
barbarian Arab raiders who had not yet had time, since their passage of
the Roman Empire’s Syrian limes, to tread the barbarian conqueror’s
demoralizing road all the way to its miserable journey’s end. The alter¬
native route to the same dismal goal is the even less romantic path that
was trodden by the Kassites and the Merovingians, who were denied the
comparatively honourable exit of a violent death in order to be sentenced
in the bankruptcy court of History when they had run through the
wasting assets of a civilization which had already gone into disintegration
before they had arrived on the scene to speed the course of its ruin by
making a bonfire out of a dead society’s derelict social heritage.

In whichever of these two alternative ways they meet their end, 3 the
barbarians in partibus civilium cast themselves, as we have observed by
anticipation, 4 for the sordid role of vultures feeding on carrion or mag¬
gots crawling in a carcass; and it has been noticed by Ibn Khaldun that
they are apt to display a most unheroic prudence in keeping at a safe
distance from their dying victim’s body until the life has so far gone out
of him that there is no danger any longer of his being able to offer any
resistance.

‘[The future founders of a successor-state] give way to baseless fears
whenever they hear talk of the [flourishing] state of the existing empire and
of the vast resources that it has at its command. This is enough to deter
them from attacking it, and so their chief is obliged to have patience and
to bide his time. But, when the empire has fallen into complete decadence,
as invariably happens, and when its military and financial strength has
suffered mortal injuries, this chief is rewarded for having waited so long by
now finding himself able to take advantage of the opportunity of conquer¬
ing the empire. . . . When the will of God has made itself manifest, and
the old empire is on the point of collapse, after haying reached the term
of its existence, and has become disorganised in all its parts, its feebleness
and exhaustion attract its adversary’s notice. . . . Encouraged by this
discovery, the people of the new empire prepare with one accord to open
the attack; the imaginary dangers that had shaken their resolution up to
that moment now disappear, the period of waiting comes to an end, and
the conquest is accomplished by force of arms.’*

1 In the passage quoted on p. 37, n. 2, above.

1 Luke xi. 21-22; cp. Matt. xii. 29; Mark iii. 27.

J These alternative endings of the barbarians' adventures have been touched upon
in I. i. 58-59 and in IV. iv. 4S4-6, and are surveyed at greater length at the close of the
present chapter. • In I. i. 62.

* Ibn Khaldun: MuqaddamSt, translated by de Slane, Baron McG. (Paris 1863-8,
Imprimeric Iinpdriale, 3 vols.), vol. ii, pp. 134-5.

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 49

As examples of this circumspect method of ‘conquering’ a moribund
universal state, Ibn Khaldun cites the eviction of the Umayyads by the
'Abbasids; the supplanting of the 'Abbasids in their turn by the Tabari
'Alids in Daylam and by the Daylamis in the two ‘Ir 5 qs and in Fare; the
eviction of the ‘Abbasids’ local successors in Egypt by the Kat 5 ma
Berbers (‘the Fatimids’), of the Ghaznawids by the Saljuq Turks, and of
the last of the ‘Abbasids and their supplanters east of the Euphrates by
the Mongols, who, as he points out, took forty years (a.d. 1220-60) to
build their empire up; the eviction of the Far Western Umayyads’
successors by the Lamtuna Berbers (the MurSbits), of the Lamtuna
by the Masmuda (the Muwahhids), and of the Masmuda by the ZanSta
(the Marauds). 1 After presenting his readers with this survey, Ibn
Khaldun anticipates a pious Muslim’s objection that the Primitive
Muslim Arabs’ conquest of the Romans and the Sasanidac was a genuine
—and tremendous—feat of arms, and he concedes that this is a miracu¬
lous exception of the kind that proves a rule. A more sceptical student of
this at first sight astonishing achievement may be inclined to question
whether Ibn Khaldun need have feared that it might seem to invalidate
his thesis; for, when all allowance has been made for the tlan of a
Khalid b. Walid, a satisfactory and sufficient explanation of the rapidity
and ease of the Arab conquests is to be found in the fact that, immediately
before the Arabs’ eruption, the Roman and Sasanian empires had bled
one another white and fought one another to a standstill in the inter¬
necine wars of a . d . 572-91 and a . d . 603-28, and that the Monophysite
Christian subjects of the Roman Empire south of the Taurus were at
least as deeply alienated from their ‘Mclchitc’ Orthodox Christian rulers
as the Nestorian Christian subjects of the Sasanian Empire in ‘Iraq were
from their Zoroastrian rulers.

If the parasitism and the idleness already displayed by the barbarian
while still beyond the pale are apt to luxuriate as soon as the collapse of a
moribund universal state’s last pouxrs of resistance removes the last
check on this cautiously predatory scavenger’s perpetual temptation to
take his ease, other vices, previously latent, become flagrantly manifest
in the barbarian as soon as he brings upon himself, by breaking through
the limes, the fantastic experience of ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’.
The origin of this revolting array of moral disorders is to be found in
a sudden emancipation for which the victim-beneficiary is morally un¬
prepared. Liberation from the restraint imposed by the existence of the
limes, and of the Power behind it, is as demoralizing for the barbarian as,
in the would-be civilized society that he overruns, is an adolescent’s
escape from the control of parents and pedagogues before the creature
has acquired the will or power to attempt to control itself.

‘The qualities exhibited by these societies, virtues and defects alike,
arc clearly those of adolescence_The characteristic feature ... is eman¬

cipation—social, political, and religious—from the bonds of tribal law.

. . . The characteristics of heroic ages in general are those neither of
infancy nor of maturity. . . . The typical man of the Heroic Age is to be
compared rather with a youth. . . . For a true analogy we must turn to

« Ibid., pp. 135 - 7 -

5 o HEROIC AGES

the case of a youth who has outgrown both the ideas and the control of
his parents—such a case as may be found among the sons of un¬
sophisticated parents who through outside influence, at school or else¬
where, have acquired knowledge which places them in a position of
superiority to their surroundings.’ 1

The latent weakness of the abruptly emancipated adolescent comes
out conspicuously on the social and political plane. As we have noticed
already, 2

‘in social organisation the distinguishing feature of the Heroic Age is in
the nature of a revolt or emancipation from those tribal obligations and
ideas by which the society of primitive peoples is everywhere governed.
The same remark applies in principle to political organisation: the
princes of the Heroic Age appear to have freed themselves to a large
extent from any public control on the part of the tribe or community.
The changes which we have noted in Religion have a similar tendency.
Tribal ideas give way to universalism both in the cult of higher powers
and in the conception of immortality; and in both the Teutonic and Greek
heroic ages these changes seem to be associated with a weakening in the
force of Religion.... It will be seen that the emancipation of which we are
speaking is partly of an intellectual character. This applies both to Reli¬
gion and to those ideas which govern social relations. On the other hand
it is also partly in the nature of a freedom from outside control, both in
social relations and in government. The force formerly exercised by the
kindred is now largely transferred to the comitatus, a body of chosen ad¬
herents pledged to personal loyalty to their chief. So also, in government,
the council of the tribe or community has come to be nothing more than
a comitatus or court. The result of the change is that the man who pos¬
sesses a comitatus becomes largely free from the control of his kindred,
while the chief similarly becomes free from control within his community.’ 3

The Bankruptcy of a Fallen Civilized Empire's Barbarian Successor-
states.

On the barbarian’s native heath beyond the pale, this social and
political revolution wears the aspect of an act of creation opportunely
filling a vacuum produced by the disintegration of primitive institutions
under the corroding influence of the civilization behind the limes; and
in this relatively simple social environment the new* regime duly serves
its turn well enough sometimes to move the statesmen of the adjoining
universal state to utilize it for their own purpose of transforming a
no-man’s-land into a glacis for a Festung-OikoumenS. The capacity of a
barbarian war-lord and his comitatus to perform, on occasion, the ser¬
vice of providing a buffer-state for a universal state in the last phase of
its history was demonstrated in the histories of the Ghassanid Arab
principality, covering the Syrian desert frontier of the Roman Empire, 4

' Chadwick, H. M.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1912, University Press), pp. 442-4.

J On pp. 10 and 38, above. * Chadwick, op. cit., p. 443.

* 'L’empercur Icur confcra 1 c titre dc patricc, qui les hissait au sommet de la
hi^rarchie byxantine. J1 cr*a pour cux la dignity de phylarche ou commandant dcs tribus.
C’itait rattacher au phylarcat gassanide tous les Bidouins. places sous la mouvance plus
ou moins dircctc de l’cmpirc, cn Syric ct dans les ddserts limitrophes. Reprdsentants
officiels de Cdsar auprds dc leurs compatriotes, les dmira assumaient la surveillance du
limes, de la frontiers syro-palestinienne. 11s devaient favoriscr la pdndtration dc l’in-

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 51
and its counterpart and adversary the Lakhmid Arab principality,
covering the 'Ir 3 qi desert frontier of the Sasanian Empire, during the
last hundred years before both these buffer-states were swept away by
the Primitive Muslim Arabs’ onslaught 1 on the imperial Powers whom
the Ghasspids and the Lakhmids had served so well for so long. 1 The
same tale is told by the history of the Salian Frankish guardians of the
Roman Empire’s Lower Rhenish frontier during the century following
their plantation in Toxandria as dediticii by the Emperor Julian in
a.d. 358 ; 3 and the principality of Afghanistan served the British Indian
Empire in a similar capacity during the forty years a.d. 1879-1919.

fluencc romaine, derriire !n ligne de fortins et dc castella, tendue depuis le Nord de la
Palmyrene jusque vers Aila, pour protfger !es agglomerations de s^dentaires. Cette
institution du phylarcat gassSnide, mdcanisme souple et peu coflteux, fut une dcs plus
hcureuscs inspirations dc la penftration pacifique. Elle garantissait A la fois la sfcuritd
des frontiires, 1c prestige de l’Empire, tout en minageant l'amour-propre ombrageux
des Bedouins' (Lammens, S.J., Pire H.: La Mecque d la Vrills de I'H/gire (Bayrut
1924, Imprimerie Catholique), p. 244).

1 The Muslim Arab conquerors found the two Christian march states themselves
less difficult to liquidate than the historic feud between them. In the civil war between
'Ali and Mu'awiyah which followed close on the heels of the conquest (see the present
chapter, p. 64, below), 'All, from his capital at Kufah, was playing the prince of Hijah's
traditional part, and Mu'awiyah, from his capital at Damascus, the Ghassanid phy-
larch’s (sec VI. vii. 131, n. 3).

* The Roman Empire’s Ghassanid Arab march was organized by the Emperor Jus¬
tinian circa a.d. 530-1, and, according to Lammens, op. cit., pp. 244-5 this initiative
on the Roman Imperial Government’s part led the Sasanian imperial Government to
confer a corresponding status on its own Arab prot^gfs and political agents, the Lakh¬
mids. This change in the Lakhmids’ position seems to have been formal rather than
substantial, since, dt facto, the Lakhmids had already been serving as the wardens of
the Sasanids’ desert march, and this going concern was no doubt the model which ’
Justinian had before his eyes when he created his own Ghassanid phylarchy. According
to de Lacy O'Leary, Arabia before Muhammad (London 1927, Kegan Paul), p. 155,
the Lakhmids had been the Sasanids’ Arab agents since the time of the second Sasanian
emperor, Shapur I {accentt a.D. 241). During the decadence of the foregoing Parthian
Arsacid regime which the Persian Sasanidae had now swept away, there had been an
infiltration of Nomad Arabs, not only into the North Mesopotamian Steppe, but into
the cultivated lands in 'Iraq, and the newly established Sasanian Power found itself
confronted with the task of reducing these interlopers to order. When Shapur I in¬
herited this formidable task from his father Ardeshir I, the founder of the Sasanian
Empire, he forbore to carry out to the bitter end the policy of subjugating these recal¬
citrant Arabs within his frontier* by force of arms, and resorted to the alternative policy
of indirect rule through an Arab deputy—a compromise which vindicated the Sasanian
Imperial Government’s suzerainty without depriving the Arabs of their autonomy.
The deputy whom Shapur I appointed was the Lakhmid *Amr b. 'Adi, and this appoint¬
ment was the origin of the Sasanian Arab march with its administrative centre at Hirah.
This Sasanian march, like its Roman counterpart, was still in existence at the time of the
Muslim Arab conquest, though the Lakhmid dynasty had been deposed by the Sasanian
Emperor Khusru II Parwiz. According to O’Leary’, op. cit., pp. x6o-r, the last of the
Lakhmid princes of Hirah, a Nu'man, fled to the desert, for fear of the Sasanian
Government’s hostility, in A.D. 605, and returned and was put to death by Parwiz
circa a.d. 620 [sic]. After putting Nu'man to death, Parwiz replaced him on the throne of
Hirah by Iyas of the tribe of Tayy, and then, after Ivas' death, annexed Hirah, in A.D.
614 [sic], to the territories under the Sasanian Crown a direct administration. According
to Christensen, A.: Iran sous let Sananidet (Copenhagen 1936, Levin & Munkegaard),
p. 447, the date at which Nu'man was put to death by Parwiz was some time between

A l j’ 'f hough SaHan'prankish war-bands under Merovingian leadership began, as early as
the fifth decade of the fifth century, to encroach upon Roman Imperial domain-land*
in Northern Gaul beyond the limits of the territory originally assigned to them by the
Roman authorities, another Salian war-lord, Clogio, was defeated by AJtius at Vicus
Helena (Helcsmcs) in an attempt to seize Cambrai. The diplomatic Roman victor re¬
warded the defeated Salians for their misdemeanours by allowing them to retain the
conquests that they had made up to that point, and by raising their status from that
of dediticii (who, at least in theory, were required to do their military service for
the Empire as regular soldiers enrolled in units of the Imperial Army) to the status of

52 HEROIC AGES

These examples show that a barbarian military monarchy may prove
equal to the task of holding the wardenship of a march, against its fellow
barbarians beyond the pale, under a universal state’s auspices. But the
fates of the successor-states established by barbarian conquerors in the
interior of an extinct universal state’s former domain show still more
clearly that this equivocal achievement of a jejune barbarian political
genius is quite unequal to the task of bearing burdens and solving
problems that are thrown upon it because they have proved too much
for the statesmanship of an oecumenical Power that has been heir to the
cumulative political experience of an entire civilization. How, indeed,
could a challenge that has defeated the efforts of even a broken-down
civilization be expected to receive a victorious response from barbarian
interlopers? If the god Helios himself had lost command of his fiery
steeds, the catastrophic outcome of a mortal Phacthon’s audacious en¬
deavour to stay the hazardous course would have been doubly inevitable.

A barbarian successor-state blindly goes into business on the strength
of the dishonoured credits of a universal state that has already gone into
bankruptcy; and these boors in office hasten the advent of their in¬
evitable doom by a self-betrayal through the outbreak, under stress of
a moral ordeal, of something fatally false within; 1 for a polity based
solely on a gang of armed desperados’ fickle loyalty to an irresponsible
military leader, 2 while it may be adequate for the organization of a raid
or, at a pinch, for the administration and defence of a march, is morally
unfit for the government of a community that has made even an un¬
successful attempt at civilization. 3 It is far more unfit than would have
been the unsophisticated yet respectable primitive rule of custom in¬
terpreted by the living elders of the tribe 4 into whose swept and gar-

foederati (whose privilege il was to serve in national units of their own). Under this new
arrangement the Salians duly fought on the Roman side against Attila at the Campus
Mauriacus in A.D. 451: quondam militet Romani, tunc vtro iam in numero auxiliarium
exquisiti (Jordancs: Getiea, 191). After Aitius's death in a . d . 454 Clogio took Cambrai
and advanced to the Somme, but the Imperial Government's authority was once again
established over the foederati in Gaul by the Emperor Majorian ( imperabat a . d . 457-61),
and thereafter the Salians continued, at least formally, to recognize the authority of
Aegidius, Majorian's magister miUtum per Galliot, who held on at Soissons after Ma-
jorian's assassination. It was not till A.D. 486/7, when Merovech’s grandson Clovis
(Chlodovcch) attacked and overthrew Aegidius’s successor Syagrius, that the Mero¬
vingian buffer-state of the Roman Empire openly asserted its independence (see
Schmidt, L.: ‘Aus den Anfangcn dcs Salfrankischcn KOnigtums’, in Klio, vol. xxxiv,
pp. 306-27).

1 Meredith, George, quoted in IV. iv. 120 and VI. vii. 46.

* 'Irresponsible power, uncontrolled by any settled traditions of ordered freedom,
will often assert itself or defend itself by savage cruelty. The catalogue of such enormities
is too long and monotonous to be told in detail’ (Dill, S.: Roman Society in Gaul in
the Merovingian Age (London 1926, Macmillan), p. 133, introducing an anthology of
Merovingian atrocities).

1 The failure of the barbarian successor-states of a fallen civilized empire to carry
out their self-imposed mandate is the more signal, considering that they arc ant, at their
inauguration, to be presented with the invaluable unearned asset of a fund of good will
in the hearts of their newly acquired civilized subjects. These cx-citizens of a fallen
universal state are so utterly disillusioned with the decadent imperial rdgime from whose
incompetence and corruption they and their forebears have suffered for many genera¬
tions past, that they are inclined to greet even a barbarian alternative regime as a wel¬
come alleviation. See Orosius: Historiae Advertum Paganot, Book VII, chap, xli, $ 7,
and Salvian: De Gubernatione Dei, Book V, §§ 21-22 and 36-37, quoted by E. M. Pick-
man in The Mind of Latin Christendom (London 1937, Oxford University Press), pp.
* 73 - 4 - 4 See II. i. 191-2.

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 53
nished house' this gangster-constitution has forced its entry since the
radiation of a disintegrating civilization has perverted that decadent
society’s once primitive neighbours into bands of adolescent barbarians. 2

When these barbarian war-bands have entered into their kingdom in
the former domain of a fallen universal state, the dissolution of the
primitive kin-group in the barbarian comitatus is swiftly followed by the
dissolution of the comitatus itself in the alien subject population.

‘The Arabs who have settled in . . . regions which afford rich pastures
for their flocks, and which provide everything required for making life
agreeable, have allowed the purity of their race to be corrupted by mar¬
riages with foreign families. This has been the history of the Lakhm, the
Judhilm, the Ghassin, the Tayy, the Khuza'ah, the Ayyad and the other
tribes descended from Himyar and Kahlan. . . . The Caliph Umar said:
“Learn your genealogies, and do not be like the Nabataeans [settled
Arabs] of As-Sawad [the alluvial,plain of *Ir 3 q]; when one asks one of
them where he comes from, he answers: From such and such a village."
But the Arabs established in fertile countries with fat pastures found
themselves in contact with other peoples, and this led to an intermingling
of race and blood. Indeed, from the first days of Islam, people began
to name the [interloping Arab] tribes after the countries of which they
were in occupation. People spoke, for example, of the jund [cantonment]
of Qinnasrin, the jund of Damascus, the jund of the ‘AwSsim. The same
usage made its way into Andalusia. The Arabs had not, as a matter of fact,
renounced the custom of calling themselves by the name of the tribe to
which they belonged; they were merely adopting an additional surname,
in order to make it easier for their war-lords to distinguish them. There¬
after, [however,] they mixed with the inhabitants of the towns—people
mostly of foreign race—and in this way they lost their purity of blood
entirely. From that time onwards, family ties became so weak among them
that they lost their sense of nationality. . . . Next, the tribes themselves
became extinct, and their liquidation brought with it the disappearance
of all esprit de corps'*

The Restraining Influences of Aid 6 s, Nemesis, and Hiltn.

The barbarian trespassers in partibus civi/ium have, in fact, con¬
demned themselves to suffer a moral breakdown as an inevitable con¬
sequence of their own adventurous act. 4 Yet they do not yield to their

« Matt. xii. 44; Luke xi. 25. ......

‘ The moral inferiority of the adolescent harbanan to his primitive predecessor has
been pointed gut by H. G. Wells in The Outline of History (London 1920, Cassell),
p. 29S, in a passage which is a fine example of his intuitive genius. (In order to transpose
this passage into the terminology of the present Study, Wells' term ‘barbarism’ has, of
course, to be construed as ‘primitive life', and his term ‘savage’ as 'primitive .)

‘It is frequently said that Europe in the sixth and seventh centuries relapsed into
barbarism, but that does not express the reality of the case very well. Barbarism is a
social order of an elementary type, orderly within its limits; the state of Europe beneath
its political fragmentation was a social disorder. Its moral was not that of a kraal, but
that of a slum. In a savage kraal a savage knows that he belongs to a community , and
lives and acts accordingly; in a slum the individual neither knows of, nor acts in relation
to, any greater being.’ „

1 Ibn Khaldun: Muqaddtmdt, translated by de Slanc, Baron McG. (Pans 1863-8,
Imprimeric Imp<riale, 3 vols.), vol. i, pp. 271-3* , , , . .

* Ibn KhaldOn traces the stages of this demoralization with a masterly hand, and
with a wealth of illustrations from the histories of Arab and Berber barbanan inter¬
lopers, in op. cit., vol. i, especially pp. 292-7 and 342 - 59 *

54 HEROIC AGES

self-decreed doom without a spiritual struggle that has left its traces in
their literary records of myth and ritual and standards of conduct.

The barbarians’ ubiquitous master-myth describes the hero’s vic¬
torious fight with a monster for the acquisition of a treasure which the
unearthly enemy is withholding from Mankind in order to devour it or
to hoard it for his own bestial satisfaction. This is the common motif of
the tales of Beowulf’s fight with Grcndel and Grendel’s mother; Sieg¬
fried’s fight with the dragon; Perseus’ feat of slaying and decapitating
a gorgon the sight of whose head would have turned him to stone if he
had not skilfully avoided setting eyes on it, and his subsequent feat of
winning Andromeda for his bride by slaying the sea-monster who was
threatening to devour her. The motif reappears in Jason’s outmanoeuv¬
ring of the serpent-guardian of the Golden Fleece and in Herakles’
kidnapping of Cerberus. This myth looks like a projection, on to the
outer world, of a psychological struggle, in the barbarian’s own soul,
for the rescue of Man’s supreme spiritual treasure, his rational will, from
a demonic spiritual force released in the abyss of the unconscious depths
of the Psyche by the shattering experience of passing, at one step, from
a familiar no-man’s-land outside the limes into the enchanted world laid
open by the barrier’s collapse. The myth may indeed be a translation
into literary narrative of a ritual act of exorcism in which a militarily
triumphant but spiritually afflicted barbarian has attempted to find a
practical remedy for his devastating psychological malady . 1

In the emergence of special standards of conduct applicable to the
peculiar circumstances of an heroic age we can see a further attempt,
from another line of approach, to set moral bounds to the ravages of a
demon that has been let loose in the souls of the barbarian lords and
masters of a prostrate civilization by the fall of the material barrier of
the limes. Conspicuous examples are the Achaeans’ Homeric Aid 6 s and
Nemesis (‘Shame’ and ‘Indignation’) and the Umayyads’ historic Hilrn
(a studied Self-Restraint).

‘The great characteristic of [Aid 6 s and Nemesis], as of Honour generally,
is that they only come into operation when a man is free: when there is
no compulsion. If you take people . . . who have broken away from all
their old sanctions and select among them some strong and turbulent
chief who fears no one, you will first think that such a man is free to do
whatever enters his head. And then, as a matter of fact, you find that,
amid his lawlessness, there will crop up some possible action which some¬
how makes him feel uncomfortable. If he has done it, he "rues” the deed
and is haunted by it. If he has not done it, he "shrinks” from doing it.
And tin’s, not because anyone forces him, nor yet because any particular
result will accrue to him afterwards, but simply because he feels aidds ... .*

‘Aid 6 s is what you feel about an act of your own; Nemesis is what you

1 This fascinating subject has been explored by Gustav Hdbener in a series of studies:
England und die Gesitttmgsgrundlage der EurofSitchen Fruhgeschichte (Frankfurt am
Main 1930); ‘Der Heroischc Exorzismus der Nordischcn Rasse und der Winckelried-
sagenkreia am Vierwaldstattersec’, in Gcmanisch-Romanische Monattschrift, 1931;
‘Beowulf and German Exorcism’, in Rniete of English Studies, vol. xi, No. 42 , 1935;
‘Beowulf's "Scax", the Saxons, and an Indian Exorcism’, ibid., vol. xii. No. 48. 1930.

* It will be seen that, in H. G. Wells’ terms (see the passage quoted on p. 53, n. 2,
above), Aid6s is essentially a virtue of ‘a slum’ in which ’the individual neither knows
of, nor acts in relation to, any greater being.’—A.J.T.

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 55

feel for the act of another. Or, most often, it is what you imagine that
others will feel about you. . . . But suppose no one sees. The act, as you
know well, remains venecijrov—a thing to feel nemesis about: only there
is no one there to feel it. Yet, if you yourself dislike what you have done,
and feel aid 6 s for it, you inevitably are conscious that somebody or some¬
thing dislikes or disapproves of you-The Earth, Water, and Air [are]

full of living eyes: of them, of daimones, of ktres. .. . And it is they who
have seen you and are wroth with you for the thing which you have done.' 1

In a post-Minoan heroic age, as depicted in the Homeric Epic, the
actions that evoke feelings of AMs and Nemesis are those implying
cowardice, lying, and perjury, lack of reverence, and cruelty or treachery
towards the helpless. 2

'Apart from any question of wrong acts done to them, there are certain
classes of people more alBoioi, objects of aidOs, than others. There are
people in whose presence a man feels shame, self-consciousness, awe, a
sense keener than usual of the importance of behaving well. And what sort
of people chiefly excite this aMs? Of course there arc kings, elders and
sages, princes and ambassadors: alSotoi fiaoiAfjts, ylpovres, and the like:
all of them people for whom you naturally feel reverence, and whose
good or bad opinion is important in the World. Yet.. . you will find that
it is not these people, but quite others, who arc most deeply charged, as it
were, with AMs— before whom you feel still more keenly conscious of
your unworthiness, and whose good or ill opinion weighs somehow in¬
explicably more in the last account: the disinherited of the Earth, the
injured, the helpless, and, among them the most utterly helpless of all,
the dead.’ 1

In contrast to AMs and Nemesis, which enter into all aspects of
social life, Hibn is a vertu des politiques * Before the inauguration of
Islam the practice of Hibn had been learnt by Abu Sufy 3 n, the father
of a Mu'awiyah who was to found the Umayyad Power, in the school
of the mercantile republic of Mecca: 5 a cultural as well as physical oasis
in the desert of Arab barbarism where the rudiments of city-state life
had been propagated by a radiation of Syriac and Hellenic influences
which, at earlier dates, had produced more brilliant fruits of the kind
at Palmyra and at Petra. 6 Abu SufySn’s son the Caliph Mu'awiyah I
claimed that Hilm was an Umayyad family virtue, 7 and Mu'awiyah
himself came to figure as the classical exponent of it. 8 One of Mu'awiyah’s
dicta was that ‘ Hibn would be universal if everyone had Abu Sufyan
for his ancestor ’P But ‘the qualities which, when found in combination,
the Arabs designated by the name of Hilm' were ‘as rarely met with as

» Murray, Gilbert: The Rise of the Greek Epic, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1924. Clarendon

a Ibidl^ pp. 85-87. * Ibid., pp. 87-88.

* Lammens. S.J., Pire H.: litudet sur le Regne du Calife Omoxyade Mo'&eia !•'

S .yrflt 1908, Imprimerie Catholique; Paris 1908, Gcuthner), p. 81, n. 2. The quotations
m this book have been made with the permission of the publishers,
s See Lammens, op. cit., p. 89. 6 See I. i. 74, n. 4. and II. 11. 9-12.

1 See Lammens, op. tit., p. 88, n. 3. . .

» See Lammens, op. cit, pp. 66-67. A monograph entitled 7 /tf Ihlm of Mu dtciyah
is one of the lost works of the Classical Arabic Literature (Lammens, op. cit., p. 89),
but Lammens has collected anecdotes on the subject, from surviving works, in op. cit.

S 6 HEROIC AGES

they were highly prized among a passionate people whose temperament
was a bundle of nerves—nerves almost showing through the skin and
reacting to the slightest external shock’. 1

'Hilm is neither patience nor moderation nor clemency nor long-suffer¬
ing nor self-possession nor maturity of character. It merely borrows from
each of these qualities certain external traits, to an extent just sufficient
to take in an observer who is not on the alert. The product of these super¬
ficial loans is a virtue that is specifically Arab.’*

Hilm is thus something more sophisticated than AidSs and Nemesis,
and consequently also something less attractive. Hilm is emphatically
not an expression of humility; ‘its aim is rather to humiliate an adver¬
sary : to confound him by presenting the contrast of one’s own superior¬
ity; to surprise him by displaying the dignity and calm of one’s own
attitude’. 1 The practice of Hilm is not incompatible with inward feelings
of resentment, animus, and vindictiveness. 4 Hilm is not within the
competence of anyone who is not rich and powerful, and it presupposes
not only the possession of power but the possibility of abusing it in
order to injure one’s neighbour without having to fear the consequences
of one’s action. 5

‘In the desert, every true “gentleman” must have in his moral coach¬
house (remise) —or, as wc are tempted to say, in his moral stable (tcurie )—
two steeds to choose between at his pleasure. On the one, he makes a
parade of clemency. The other—and this is the one which he prefers to
mount—allows him to show himself in his true colours. . . . 6

‘At bottom, Hilm, like most Arab qualities, is a virtue for bravado and
display, with more ostentation in it than real substance: one form of
Nomad stoicism—a stoicism tinged with pharisaism. Among a theatrical
people that is the devitalised heir of a race which has been initiated into
civilisation at a very early date, but which has since relapsed into the state
of nature, a reputation for Hilm can be acquired at the cheap price of an
elegant gesture or a sonorous mot: it does not pre-suppose a serious
spiritual struggle against angry passions, against pride, or against the
desire for vengeance. It can be combined with brutality in daily life . . . 7

‘In reality Hilm (as Ahnaf has remarked with profound insight) was not
so much a virtue as an attitude—a prudent opportunism serving as a safe¬
guard against abuses of authority, which are always regrettable, under a
regime which in principle was democratic; opportune above all in an
anarchic milieu, such as the Arab Society was, where every act of violence
remorselessly provoked a retaliation. It was no feeling of humanity, but
a fear of the thar (emeute), that inspired the Badawi with a horror of blood¬
shed. And thus the virtue of Hilm was revealed to him by the disagree¬
ableness of the consequences of a passionate word or gesture. From this
point of view , Hilm was something that could not be ignored by the chiefs,
who were obliged by their situation to maintain an equilibrium between
the elements of disorder that were rife within the bosom of the tribe.
Given the parliamentary institutions [of the Arab heroic age], Hilm
became, for the depositary of [political] power, a virtue of the first
order.. . . s

1 Lammens, op. cit., p. 69. * Ibid., p. 67.

3 Ibid., p. 68. ♦ See ibid., p. 69.

5 See ibid., pp. 72 and 79. * Ibid., p. 76.

7 Ibid., p. 81. • * Ibid., p. 87.

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 57

'Hilm, as practised by [Mu'SwIyah’s Umayyad successors], facilitated
their task of giving the Arabs a political education; it sweetened for their
pupils the bitterness of having to sacrifice the anarchic liberty of the Desert
in favour of sovereigns who were condescending enough to draw a velvet
glove over the iron hand with which they ruled their empire.’ 1

These acute characterizations of the nature of Hilm, Aid 6 s, and Nemesis
from the masterly hands of sensitive students of the surviving records
show how nicely adapted these standards of conduct are to the peculiar
political, social, and psychological circumstances of the Heroic Age; and,
if, as we have intimated already, the Heroic Age is intrinsically ‘a tran¬
sient phase’, 1 the surest sign of its advent and its recession are the
epiphany and the eclipse of ideals that are its specific attendant moral
luminaries. Stars whose faint but precious glimmer through the evening
twilight has been the only consolation for the setting of the Sun cease
to be visible in the darkness before dawn,

‘and then, at long last, shall those spirits go their way to Olympus from
the wide-wayed Earth, with their beautiful faces veiled in white raiment,
seeking the company of the immortals and leaving behind them the com¬
pany of men—even the spirits of Shame and Indignation.’ 3

As Aid 6 s and Nemesis thus fade from view', their disappearance draws
a cry of despair from the weary watcher of the skies. ‘Pain and grief are
the portion that shall be left for mortal men, and there shall be no
defence against the evil day.’ 4 Hesiod is harrowed by his illusory con¬
viction—which it never occurs to him to doubt—that the withdrawal
of the glimmering light that has sustained the children of the Dark Age
through their vigil is a portent of the onset of an unmitigated and per¬
petual night; and he has no inkling that, on the contrary, this extinguish¬
ing of beacons is a harbinger of the return of day. The truth is that
Aid 6 s and Nemesis rcascend into Heaven as soon as the imperceptible
emergence of a nascent new civilization has made their sojourn on Earth
superfluous by bringing into currency other virtues that are socially
more constructive though aesthetically they may be less attractive. The
Iron Age into which Hesiod lamented that he had been born, because
it was the age that had seen Aidds and Nemesis shake the dust of this
Earth from off their feet, was in fact the age in which a living Hellenic
Civilization was arising out of a dead Minoan Civilization’s ruins; and
the 'Abbasids, who had no use for the Hilm that had been their Umayyad
predecessors’ arcanum imperii, were the statesmen who set the seal on
the Umayyads’ tour dc force of profiting by the obliteration of the Syrian
limes of the Roman Empire through the demonic outbreak of the
Primitive Muslim Arabs in order to reinauguratc a Syriac universal
state that had been prematurely overthrown, a thousand years before,
by Alexander the Great.*

“With the 'Abbasids, Hilm will lose its value in the sphere of govern¬
ment, to become a virtue of private life. After the destruction of the former

1 Chadwick, &. .VI.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1912, University Press), p. 44a.
i Hesiod: Works and Days, 11 . 197-200.

♦ Ibid., II. 200-1. 1 See 1 .1. 77.

58 HEROIC AGES

Arab supremacy and Arab society ..absolutism, now firmly established
from one end of the Islamic World to the other, no longer felt the neces¬
sity of resorting to Hilm in order to overcome the recalcitrance of a public
opinion which, thenceforward, was condemned to silence. ... In under¬
mining, at its foundations, the organisation of the former Arab Society,
and in forcing all necks to bow beneath the dead level of despotism, the
'Abbasid regime was to obtain more decisive results than the lectures
( mercuriales ) delivered [by Umayyad governors] from the tribunes at
Kufah and Basrah.’ 1

It was significant that, in order to ensure the salvaging of the Syriac
Civilization from the chaos of a post-Hellenic Arab heroic age, there had
to be a change of political regime, and that the barbaric turbulence of
the Arab war-bands could be reduced to order only at the price of also
suppressing their aristocratic freedom; for the Primitive Muslim Arabs
had been perhaps the most gifted of all barbarian warriors, and the
Umayyads of all barbarian statesmen, that had so far flitted across the
stage of History. Umayyad statesmanship had achieved the unparalleled
feat of transforming an Arab barbarian successor-state of the Roman
Empire in Syria into an avatar of the universal state that had originally
been provided for the Syriac Civilization, eleven hundred years before,
by the Empire of the Achaemenidac. This was an achievement of which
the Umayyads’ Ghassanid forerunners had never dreamed, and to which
the Ghassanids’ Palmyrene predecessors had aspired with disastrous
consequences for themselves. Yet the raw material of Arab barbarism

E roved so intractable even to the Umayyad genius 2 that an Umayyad
•avid’s work had to be completed by an 'Abbasid Solomon. The exact¬
ing, though misguided, task of evoking, in a nascent Far Eastern and
noscent Western Christian Society, a ghost of the antecedent civiliza¬
tion’s universal state was likewise beyond the interloping barbarians’
powers. It is not surprising that, before this task could be taken in hand

1 Lammens, S.J., Pi re H.: Eludes sur le Rtgne du Calife Omaiyade Mo'data 1 "
(Pari* 1908, Gcuthner). pp. 106 and 86-87. For the anti-ariatocratic egalitarianism of the
despotic 'Abbasid r*gime, see the present Study, VI. vii. 149-52.

1 'Quand on itudie Ics origines ct l'organisation de 1’Empire Arabe, on ne tarde
pas 4 ddcouvrir l'inconsistance de la base appuyant cette dnormc machine; la contra¬
diction perpdtuelle entre la grandeur de l'entreprise et 1'impropridtd des moyens des¬
tines 4 la faire aboutir: veritable tare originelle, dont les effets n’ont pas cessd de *e faire
sentir ... II faut tenir comptc de la matiire ingrate *ur laquellc opdra le grand calife
[Mu'iwiyah], de la resistance opposde & son action par l’irriductiblc individualisme dea
Arabes. II parvint non seulement A les discipliner; mais il les transforma en conquerants,
capablcs dc dominer des pcuples supdrieura 4 eux par l’intelligcncc et par la civilisation.
.... Pour comprendre 4 quoi aurait abouti entre leurs mains la direction de l'Islun sans
l’intervention des Omaiyades [the Umayyads], il audit de considdrer la situation de l'lraq
et des provinces orientale* au moment oti elles echurent cn partage a Mu'Awiyah. Dans
les mdtropolcs, KOfah et Basrah, le meurtre, le vol et l’incendie ctaient des faits quoti-
diens. 'Umar et 'Uthman avaient dO rcnoncer 4 y dtablir un semblant d’ordre. La voix
de ‘Ali n’arriva pas 4 dominer 1 c tumulte. Impuissant 4 sc faire respecter, il dchoua dans
la tentative d'imposer son prestige de gendre du Prophdtc, son anciennctd dans l’Islam.
qu’il ne cessait de mettre cn avant; train* 4 la remorque des bandes arabes dont il dtait
le chef nominal, frdquemmcnt abandonnd, parfois menacd de mort. Sans l'intervention
des Omaiyades et de leurs dnergiques reprdsentants—les Ziyad, les 'Ubaydallih, les
Hajjij, Ics Khalid al-Qasri—tout (’Empire Musulman sc fGt transform*, comme l’lraq,
en un champ-clos oG les Arabes seraient venus vider leurs mesquines qucrclles de tribus
(Lammens, S.J., Lc Pire H.: Eludes sur le Rignt du Calife Omaiyade Mo'dicia 1 "
(Paris 1908, Geuthner), pp. 273, 274, and 278). [The transliteration of the Arabic
pro^er^ names has been brought into line with the usage followed in this Study.—

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 59
in Western Christendom, the faineant Merovingian epigoni of Clovis
had to make way for the Carolingians. It is more remarkable that, in the
Far East, the epigoni of the Eurasian Nomad barbarian interlopers, who
had been so receptive in their attitude towards the legacy of the Sinic
culture,' should have had likewise to make way for the sedentary bar¬
barian To Pa, and these still more receptive barbarians, 2 in their turn,
for successor-states which were harbingers of the imperial Sui and
T’ang.

The Outbreak of an Invincible Criminality

The demon who takes possession of the barbarian's soul as soon as
the barbarian’s foot has crossed the fallen limes is indeed difficult to exor¬
cise, because he contrives to pervert the very virtues with which his
victim has armed himself in order to keep the demon at bay.

'Just as the athlete of asceticism strives to outdo himself because he has
lost the sane measure of social intercourse, so the viking is tempted to
overshoot his own mark: his honour becomes more exacting and often
roars like a rapacious beast that never knows when it has had its fill.’*

When the barbarian’s own peculiar virtue of AidSs thus treacherously
ministers to the frenzy which it is its mission to curb, the barbarian has
lost his desperate battle with himself, and his moral discomfiture is
advertised in an orgy of violence which eventually cures itself by the
drastic remedy of devouring its authors.

To employ the terminology of the post-Hellenic Arab heroic age,
Hilm is worsted—and is bound to be worsted—sooner or later by its anti¬
thesis and adversary Jahl. While the literal meaning of this Arabic word
is ‘ignorance’, it has a connotation of ‘passionateness (emportement),
violence, and a brutality which, among the Arabs, was sometimes con¬
fused with virility’. 4 The nick-name Abu Jahl means, not ‘the ignorant’,
but ‘the impetuous’ or ‘the emotional ( le passionnd)'}

‘In its usage as conveying the antithesis of Hilm, Jahl incarnates all the
faults deriving from rusticity and from lack of savoir-viyre, all the passion¬
ateness ( 1 ‘emportement) of youth, all the excesses committed by brute force
when it escapes from the control of the Reason. The jdhil is the enemy of
the peace-lovers or peace-makers, 6 he is destitute of the strict idea of jus¬
tice, 7 he is the victim of pleasure, and allows himself to be captivated by
the seductive charms of women. 8 He is also the unrcflective character,
the impotent sui of the Latins—incapable of mastering the angry passions.
Jahl is . . . the roughness of the manners of the Desert, the absence of
restraint in language, an obliviousness of decorum. It is Jahl that betrays
its addict into violations of the code of honour laid down in the customs
of the Desert, and into failures to live up to the convenances of social intcr-

« See Franke, O.: Grsehichte des Chinesitchen Reichts, vol. ii (Berlin and Leipzig
1036, de Gruytcr), pp. 40-41. .

i For an example of the Sinophilism of the To Po, see V. v. 477 - 3 . A master y treat¬
ment of the subject will be found in Eberhard, W.: Dot Toba-Reich Nord-Chinas
(Leiden 1049. Brill). ..... . , . .

> Grfinbcch, V.: The Culture of the Teutons (London 1931, Milford, 3 vol*. in 2),
vola. ii-iii, p. 305. * Ummena, op. cit., p. 84.

» Ibid., p. 8 5. 4 xxv. 64. ...

* Our an. zii. it: 3

7 Qur'an, xxxiii. 72.

Qur'an, xu. 33; xxviu. 55.

60 HEROIC AGES

course, the laws of hospitality, the duties of friendship, and, in short, "the
new spirit”, inaugurated by Islam, to which ... the Badu never suc¬
ceeded in conforming.' 1

Indeed, the Badawl frankly looked back to the Jdhiliyah as ‘the good
old times when people were able to live without constraint, "without
suspecting the existence of Muhammad” \ 2 In the social and psycho¬
logical landscape of the Arab heroic age the jahil and the halim were
complementary' characterizations which, between them, provided a
temperamental classification for the whole of Mankind; 3 but the issue
of the struggle between the two temperaments was a foregone con¬
clusion, since the weights in the respective scales were utterly unequal.
Not only did the juhala outnumber the hulama, and this by an over¬
whelming majority; the most deadly weakness of the exponents of Hilm
was not their numerical inferiority but their lack of genuine belief in,
and sincere devotion to, their own principle. Hilm, as we have seen, 4
‘was not so much a virtue as an attitude’. For Mu'awiyah himself, who
was the halim par excellence,

'Hilm was something that appealed to the ambition of this man of
genius, not as an end, but as a means: not so much as a moral quality
perfecting [the character of] the individual as for its utility as an instru¬
ment of government.’ 5

When the halim himself is jahil at heart, it is evident that an attitude
thus struck, without conviction, by a sceptically sophisticated minority
has no prospect of prevailing.

The works of a Jahl that Hilm has failed to chasten and that Aid 6 s
and Nemesis have been impotent to abash have left scars which arc the
barbarian’s authentic marks in the record of history. His characteristic
brutality declares itself at his first break-through. The classic example
is the obliteration of urban life in Transoxania and Khur 3 s 3 n by the
Mongols when they burst out of the heart of the Eurasian Steppe; but
the same wanton delight in destruction, and the same desperate fear of
further visitations that a first experience of these horrors has inspired
in their victims, are attested hardly less emphatically by the archaeo¬
logical evidence from the Hellenic World of the third century of the
Christian Era. In the walls built on the morrow of the disaster round the
citadel of Ankara, 6 across the agora at Athens and round the cities of
Gaul, to provide shelter within a shrunken enceinte for a decimated
population, the stones cry out 7 as they are wrenched from their original
emplacements—tomb-stone and altar and column-drum—and are piled
together in an alinement that cuts across the previous lay-out of the city
as ruthlessly as if the hands that have thrown up these hasty defences
had been those of the barbarian destroyer himself. 8 Still more shocking

1 Lammcns, op. cit., pp. 85-86.

2 Ibid., p. 83, quoting Ahtal, 311. 4.

J Ibid., p. 82, quoting Al-Mubarrad: Kamil. 425. 9.

* In the passage quoted, on p. 56, above, from Lammcns, op. cit., p. 87.

5 Ibid. p. 01.

6 See V. vi. 206, with n. 4. » Hab. ii. it; Luke xix. 40.

* A few days before writing these lines in London on the 17th December, >948, the
writer had revisited the citadel of Ankara and had seen for the first time the so-called

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 61
than the tempestuous storming of Dexippus’s Athens by the Goths is
the deliberate burning of Xerxes’ apadana at Persepolis by the Mace¬
donians; for, while it is true that Alexander did not put the inhabitants
to the sword, but, on the contrary, doled out the largesse which it had
been customary for an Achaemenian emperor to distribute when he
visited his dynasty’s homeland, 1 the destruction of a noble work of archi¬
tecture is an inexcusable act of vandalism in a barbarian whose con¬
version to Hellenism estops, for him, the Gothic plea of invincible
ignorance.

Such wholesale atrocities are the overtures to individual crimes of
violence that arc the outstanding features of the Heroic Age both in
history and in legend. The demoralized barbarian society in which
these dark deeds are perpetrated is so familiar with their performance
and so obtuse to their horror 2 that the bards whose task it is to im¬
mortalize the memory of the war-lords do not hesitate to saddle their
heroes and heroines with sins of which they have been innocent in real
life, when a blackening of their characters can heighten the artistic
merit of the story. 3 This readiness to magnify a character’s artistic
interest at the cost of his moral reputation might incline the latter-day
critic to discount the evidence of legend unsupported by independent
historical testimony, were it not that almost every enormity celebrated
in epic and saga is accredited by historically recorded parallels for which
the evidence is impeccable.

For example, the legendary murder of Priam King of Troy by Achilles’
son Pyrrhus is accredited by the historical murder of Atahualpa, the last
Imperial Inca, by his Spanish barbarian conqueror Pizarro, and of
Husayn, the last emperor of the Safawl House, by his Afghan barbarian

'Valerian’ city-wall at Athena cutting across an agora that had been excavated, since
his last visit to Athens in a.d. 1921, by American archaeological enterprise. A striking
visual impression of the extremeness 01 the disparity in size between the areas enclosed
within the Valerian Wall and within the antecedent Hudrianic Wall, respectively, is
given in the map facing p. 276 of E. P. Blegen’s 'News Items from Athens’ in the
American Journal of Archaeology, vol. I, No. 3, July-September, 1946.

* See VI. vii. 209.

2 The extent of the barbarians’ capacity for the moral digestion of their war-lords’
crimes can be measured by the length of the rope that was given by the Franks to the
Merovingians.

'The arbitrary and even savage assertion of their power... never for generations seems
to have weakened the hold of the Merovingian nice on the mass of their subjects,
whether Frank or Roman. The Merovingian family had some secret spell which guarded
them and gave them a longer permanence than was conceded to other conquering Ger¬
man tribes. The Visigoths had the evil custom of murdering their kings. If Frank kings
were murdered, it was by the will of some rival of their house. The appeal of Guntram,
in the church at Orleans in a.d. 585, that his house should be guarded from violence and
extinction, as the sole defenders of the people, was powerful and probably effective.
It was a startling appeal for loyalty from a family stained with all the crimes of Pelopid
legend. It seemed like setting wolves to guard the fold. And yet this would not represent
the facts and sentiment of the time.... The conquests of Childeric and Clovis had made
a wandering band of warriors masters of Gaul and Western Germany, and abed new
lustre on the line of Francion and Merovechus. These exploits, chanted round the
watch-fires, invested the ruling house with an imaginative halo, which is the surest
power of kingship’ (Dill, S.: Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London
1926. Macmillan), pp. 121-2).

J For instances of such uncomplimentary poetic fiction, see Chadwick, H. M.: The
Heroic Age (Cambridge 1912, University Press), pp. 156-7. For the tendency of 'heroic
tradition to part company with historical fact in the interests of art for art’s sake, see
the present Study, V. v. 607-14.

62 HEROIC AGES

jailor Ashraf. The criminality of the Afghans during their seven years’
occupation of the Safawl imperial capital, Ispahan, was peculiarly cold¬
blooded. 1 * When Husayn Shah Safawl was murdered by the barbarians
in a.d. 1729, he had not only been their captive since his capitulation
to their first war-lord Mir Mahmud on the 21st October, 1722; he had
lived to see the previous extermination of his household and his family.

‘In a.d. 1723 [Mahmud] put to death in cold blood some three hundred
of the nobles and chief citizens, and followed up this bloody deed with
the murder of about two hundred children of their families. He also killed
some three thousand of the deposed Shah’s bodyguard, together with
many other persons whose sentiments he mistrusted or whose influence
he feared.’ 1

On the 7th February', 1725, Mahmud went on to murder all surviving
members of the imperial family except Husayn himself and two of his
younger children—a crime which was overtaken by poetic justice when,
on the 22nd April following, Mahmud in his turn was assassinated by
his own cousin Ashraf for the prize of an usurped Iranian imperial
crown. 3

The murder of a defenceless defeated prince is the highest rung on
a descending ladder of barbarian criminality. At the next level below
this in the inferno of the Heroic Age we behold the barbarian war-band
murdering, not an enemy prince, but their own leader—in violation of
the personal duty of the retainer to his chief which is the most sacred
obligation in the barbarian moral code. This offence is so outrageous in
the eyes even of a barbarian bard and his audience that it might be
difficult to find a legendary counterpart of the historic murder of the
Caliph 'Uthman by a soldiery who had been thrown off their balance by
the intoxication of victory. 4 * At the next level below this we see a drunken
Alexander murdering a drunken Cleitus who can boast of having saved
his slayer-leader’s life at the battle of the Granicus—and this in the
presence of Hellenes whose already decadent civilization still shines so
bright by contrast with a Macedonian barbarism that it makes these
horrified witnesses look like dcmi-gods. s From the murder of a foster¬
kinsman 6 comrade-in-arms it is a short step downwards in the pro¬
gressive demoralization of the Heroic Age to the murder of a kinsman
by blood.

‘Instances of the slaying of kinsmen seem to have been by no means
uncommon in the Heroic Age. In Beowulf the spokesman of the Danish
kings, Unferth, is said to have killed his brothers, and, though the fact

1 See Browne, E.G.: A Literary History of Persia, vol. iv (Cambridge 1928, Univer¬

sity Press), pp. 130-3.

* Ibid., p. 130. _ 1 See ibid., p. 131.

4 . The closest parallel is perhaps to be found in the mutiny of an Indian Sepoy Army
against the British employers under whose military leadership they had achieved the
conquest of a sub-continent within the Time-span of half a century.

1 During the first phase of the drunken altercation between Alexander and Cleitus
that was to have this dreadful denouement, Alexander himself turned to two non-
Macedonian Greek guests of his and asked them: ‘How do Hellenes in Macedonian
company look to you? Don’t you feel like demigods among beasts?’ (Plutarch’s Life of
Alexander, chap. 51).

6 Cleitus was the brother of Alexander’s foster-mother LSnicd.

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 63

was a reproach to him, it apparently did not prevent him from holding
an important office at court. In the same poem we hear of dissensions
within the Swedish royal family, which ended in death for both Onela
and Eanmund. According to the legends preserved in Ynglingatal, this
family had had a very bad record for such quarrels in the past. Among the
Goths we have the case of Eormenric [Hermanaric], who put his nephews
Embrica and Fritla to death. And it is by no means only in poetry or
tradition that we meet with such cases; historians also furnish numerous
examples. Thus, according to Gregory of Tours, 1 the Burgundian King
Hilperic was killed by his brother Gundobad, while Sigismund, son of
the latter, had his own son, Sigiric, put to death.* The Thuringian King
Irminfrith slew his brother Bcrhthari; 5 the Frankish King Sigiberht was
murdered by the orders of his son Hlothric. 4 Clovis is said to have put to
death a number of his relatives, while his sons and grandsons were
repeatedly involved in deadly strife. 5 In view of such evidence wc must
conclude that the primitive sanctity of the family was giving way in the
Heroic Age. 6

The Merovingian evidence is, indeed, lavish.

‘The faithlessness attributed to the Franks in ancient writers reached
its height in the relations of the Frank kings even with their nearest kin.
Clovis by treachery and ruthlessness had swept from his path rivals pro¬
bably equally treacherous at Cologne and Cambrai. His sons and grand¬
sons, in insidious attacks on one another and shameless perfidy, almost
improved on his example. ... To this strange race, crime and perfidy
were the most natural things in the world, and their mean avidity seems
to have been equal to their treachery. Brothers as they were, proud of
their blood and race, they appear to have regarded sworn alliances as only
made for convenience and to be broken at pleasure. They were like wild
animals, watching one another in mutual fear, and always ready to spring.
Among a race so faithless, perfidy was often the only means of safety.
The crimes of the second generation make perhaps even a darker tale
than those of the first.’ 7

In the sinister light of Teutonic barbarian legend and history, the
Achaean barbarian tale of the curse on the House of Atrcus falls into
social and psychological perspective. Both its agonizing crescendo move¬
ment and its merciful finale become comprehensible. The progressive
heightening of the horror, from the ghastly banquet of Thyestes,
through the murder of a husband by his unfaithful wife, to the slaying
of a mother by her distracted son, follows the rhythm of the Heroic Age
as the iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the children unto the third
and fourth generation 8 —not because they have been condemned to
suffer by the fiat of a god whose wrath they have provoked by hating
him, but because they have been robbed of the moral raiment of primitive
custom by the radiation of a decadent civilization and then have run

Sec

regorius Turonensi*

Historia Franiorum, Book II, chap. 2S
id., Book III, chap. 5.

» See ibid., Book III, chap. 4.

See ibid., Book II, chap. 40.

» 'In some cases the deed^was certainly done by the relative’s own hand. Such wag

the case with Lothair and the song of Chlodomer (Gregory of Tourt, op. cic.. Book III,
chap. 18).’

6 Chadwick, H. M.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1912, University Press), pp. 3 . 4 ?“ 7 *

7 Dili, S.: Roman

pp. 281-3.

1 : The Heroic Are (Cambridge 1912, University Press), pp. 346-7.
1 Society in Caul 1 n (he Merovingian Age (London 1926, Macmillan),

* Exod. xx. 5.

64 HEROIC AGES

wild to wander naked in the moral wilderness left by this neighbour
society’s collapse. The lifting of the curse after its operation has come
to an intolerable climax is one of the first-fruits of the banning of the
post-Minoan Heroic Age by the beneficent Attic genius of a nascent
Hellenic Civilization 1 at the dawn following a darkness which an epi-
methean Hesiod had mistaken for eternal night. 2

When the members of a barbarian war-lord’s kin-group turn their
murderous hands against one another, it is not surprising to sec a dead
leader’s royal brood exterminated by the hands of impious alien usurpers
in the next chapter of the story—as the family of Alexander was liqui¬
dated by Cassander, and the grandson of Muhammad by the Umayyads. 1
A slaughtered Husayn received the posthumous recompense of being
idealized as a martyr whose etherialized blood mingled with his father’s 4
to become the seed of a Shi'I Church; but Olympias, Roxana, and the
child Alexander IV did not even find a pagan bard to make poetry of
their painful deaths.

Such mass-murders are mere incidents in civil strife within the bosom
of barbarian communities that arc highly enough organized to be
capable of it. Long and deadly civil wars were the immediate sequel to
swift and facile conquests of derelict worlds in the heroic ages of the
Western Christian Spanish conquerors of the Aztecs and the Incas, the
Hellenized Macedonian conquerors of the Achaemenidae, the sub¬
sequent Hellenic conquerors of the Mauryan Empire in India, 5 and the
Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors of the Romans and the Sasanidae—
Arabs who, to damn them with faint praise, had been perhaps the least
barbarous of all barbarians up to date. These episodes need not be re¬
capitulated here, since they have been surveyed already, in a different
context, 6 as examples of the militarist's ‘burden of Nineveh’. In this
place we need only point to the manifest conclusion that 'every kingdom
divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house
divided against itself shall not stand’. 7

The Dtbdclc of an Ephemeral Barbarian Ascendancy

A sensationally sudden fall from an apparent omnipotence to an un¬
mistakable impotence is, indeed, the characteristic fate of an Heroic-Age

* The sovereign virtue of Hellenism was the moderation that is exemplified in the

judgement given by the Athenian jurors and their presiding Goddess Athena at the
denouement of Aeschylus's Atreidan trilogy; and it is significant that the psychological
talisman through which Hellenism succeeded in overcoming the demonic spirit of a
post-Minoan heroic age was likewise the key to the exorcism of a post-Hellenic heroic
age by the nascent civilization of a Western Christendom. In this chapter of history,
‘moderation ... is the outstanding virtue of the chivalrous type that succeeded the heroic
type of the earlier ages’ (Menendcz Pidal, Ramdn: The Cid and his Spain, English
translation (London 1054. John Murray), p. 421). ' See p. 57, above.

* In justice to the Umayyads it should not be foigotten that Husayn brought his
death upon himself by his own folly. The Umayyad Government would have given a
fortune to see him die in his bed as their pensioner, like his elder brother Hasan after
his abdication from the succession to their father ’Ali (the allegation that Hasan met
his death, not by disease, but by poison, has been dismissed as non-proven by Lammcns,
S.J., Le Pire H.: Eludes sur le Rtgne du Calife Omaiyade Mo'dvAa l" (Paris, 1908,
Geuthncr), pp. I 49 - 53 )-

* All’s assassin was a fellow Arab, but, so far from being an agent of Mu’awiyah’s,

he was a Kharijite. s See I. i. 86.

6 In IV. iv. 484-6. i Matt. xii. 25. Cp. Mark iii. 24-25; Luke xi. 17.

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 65
barbarian Power. Striking historical examples of this play of the ironic
law of Trepirrereia are the eclipse of the Western Huns after the death
of Attila, the eclipse of the Vandals after the death of Genscric, the
eclipse of the Ostrogoths after the death of Theodoric, and the eclipse
of the Serbs after the death of Stephen Dushan. These well-attested
instances lend credibility to the tradition that the wave of Achaean con¬
quest likewise broke and collapsed immediately after engulfing Troy, and
that a murdered Agamemnon was the last Pan-Achaean war-lord* The
same fate sometimes overtakes the legacies even of those more construc¬
tive empire-builders who sweep away decadent barbarian principalities
in order to clear the ground for the appearance of the first green shoots
of a new civilization. The eclipse of the Timurids after the death of Timur
Lenk and the eclipse of the Carolingians after the death of Charlemagne
were as abrupt and complete as those of any sheerly barbarian Power.

The Huns under Attila had terrorized Europe from its Baltic to its
Mediterranean coast; the Vandals under Genseric had similarly terror¬
ized the Mediterranean from its African to its European shores; the
Ostrogoths under Theodoric had been masters of Italy; the Serbs under
Stephen Dushan had dominated the Balkan Peninsula; the Achaeans
under Agamemnon are reputed to have held a ‘thalassocracy’ in the
Aegean which they had wrested from the Minoans or from the Minoan
World’s Mycenaean marchmcn. The sudden paralysis of the energies
that had been manifesting themselves in these exhibitions of power is
to be explained by the utter incapacity of the barbarians for creating
stable and enduring political institutions. Their political potency hangs
on the thread of the single life of some war-lord of genius; and, as soon
as this thread snaps, they relapse into anarchy. Sometimes the war-lord
himself reveals the limitations of his own political sense by ineptly pro¬
viding in his testament for the partition of his dominions among his
heirs, and it was this that was the bane of the Merovingians and the
Carolingians in succession. The testator’s apologia would be that, if he
did not make provision for an orderly division in his will, his kindred
would assuredly take the law into their own violent hands by fighting
one another for the prize of his inheritance; and such forebodings are
borne out by a host of historical instances. Sometimes, again, a bar¬
barian principality may fall to pieces owing to the death or unduly pro¬
longed absence of the war-lord on some too ambitiously distant or
difficult military adventure. This is the situation depicted in the opening
books of the Odyssey. In the twentieth year of the interregnum arising
from the absence of Odysseus, every budding squire in the realm is
already playing the king;' and the comparable break-up of the Scandi¬
navian barbarian principality of Kiev in the twelfth century of the
Christian Era 2 authenticates the verisimilitude of the Homeric picture
presented in the Telemacheia without encouraging us to believe in the
happy ending which the poet’s plot requires him to give to his story.

< A catalogue of 10S suitors for the hand of Penelope from the several isles of Odys¬
seus’ kingdom is given by Telemachus in Odyssey . Book XVI, 11 . 245- SS-

* See Kliutschewskij, W. [Kluchevski, V.]: Geschichte Rutslands, vol. a (Berlin I 92 S>
Obelisk-Verlag), pp. 191-2.

66 HEROIC AGES

In real life the divided house docs fall; and an identical denouement
is produced by three variations on one theme. The barbarian successor-
state of a moribund universal state may be laid low by a counter-blow
from its expiring victim; or it may meet the same violent death at the
hands of fellow barbarians; or it may languish in impotence, after com¬
ing to the end of its prodigal feast on carrion flesh, till it is swept off the
stage of History to make way either for the re-entry of an old civilization
or for the entry of a new' one. A scrutiny of our table of barbarian war-
bands 1 yields the following catalogue of instances of these alternative
evil ends.

A revanche on the part of a civilization so far gone in the downward
course of its decline as to have been unable to prevent the barbarians
from breaking in, yet not so far gone as to be incapable of hitting back,
is rare at the final relapse, when a universal state is breaking up, but less
uncommon in the earlier chapter of the story in which the establishment
of a universal state is evoked by a Time of Troubles rising to its climax.

The most signal examples of the crushing of a barbarian invader by
a moribund civilization are to be found in Egyptiac history. The Egyptiac
Society actually rose, like Osiris, from the dead, to confound the ap¬
parently triumphant barbarian successors of ‘the Middle Empire’, when
the Hyksos were expelled from the Delta, and their survivors were pur¬
sued and subjugated, in their Syrian asylum, by a fresh breed of Theban
empire-builders who brought the Egyptiac universal state to life again
in the form of ‘the New Empire ’. 1 Moreover, this revanche upon the
Hyksos, in which ‘the New Empire’ came to birth, is matched by the
feat on which, some four hundred years later, this resuscitated Egyptiac
universal state expended its last expiring energies. The decisive victory
of ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt over the Achacans and the other ‘peoples
of the sea’ in the first decade of the twelfth century B.c. brought the
barbarians to a dead halt at the threshold of the invaded Egyptiac
World’s heartland in the Lower Nile Valley; and the lesson was so severe
that, though the survivors of the foiled barbarian war-bands were able
to encamp on ‘the New Empire’s’ South Syrian glacis, we have no
evidence of their ever having ventured to attack the Delta again.

Ramses Ill’s triumph over ‘the peoples of the sea’ has a counterpart
in Hellenic history in Justinian’s successive triumphs over the Vandals
and the Ostrogoths; and in this case the audacious barbarian invaders
paid the price of annihilation for a sensational temporary success. The
Roman Imperial Government in the West had failed to prevent the
Vandals from crossing the Straits of Gibraltar and seizing transmarine

1 Reproduced in the present volume, on pp. 734-5, from vol. vi, pp. 330-1, above.

1 The expulsion of the Hyksos from the Delta in the sixteenth century b.c. had a
second-century echo in the reaction at that date against the Ptolemaic Macedonian
domination. These two Egyptiac revolts against barbarian rule were animated by an
identical spirit of ‘Zealotism’, though their fortunes differed in the respective degrees of
their outward success. On the later occasion the Egyptiac ‘Zealots’ had to acquiesce in
leaving the Ptolemies on their shaken throne and to content themselves with extorting
from them far-reaching concessions to Egyptiac sentiment. If, in the next chapter of
the story, the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt had not been incorporated into an Hellenic
universal state in the shape of the Roman Empire, the Coptic triumph over Hellenism
in the Kulturkampf of the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian Era might have come
five or six hundred years sooner than it did.

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 67

Roman dominions in North-West Africa which ought to have been the
Empire’s impregnable citadel against barbarian invaders from the north
of Continental Europe; 1 and subsequently the Imperial Government at
Constantinople had been constrained to divert the Ostrogoths from
harrying the European suburbs of the new imperial capital by actually
inviting them to invade Italy and occupy Rome. In the blood feud
between the Romans and these two Teutonic barbarian war-bands the
vindictiveness of the injured empire’s eventual counter-blow was pro¬
portionate to the painfulness of its previous humiliations. This chastise¬
ment of the Vandals and the Ostrogoths by Justinian has Ottoman
parallels in Mchmed 'All Pasha’s chastisement of the Wahhabis and
Sultan Mahmud II’s chastisement of the Kurds—with the difference
that these Ottoman ‘Hcrodians’ 2 overthrew their barbarian adversaries
with the aid of a Western military’ technique imparted by French and
Prussian instructors, whereas Justinian mobilized the martial virtue of
his home-grown Isaurian barbarians and the military- equipment of the
Sarmatian Nomads 1 for his victorious counter-offensive against the cpi-
goni of Genseric and Theodoric.

There is a longer list of barbarian invaders of a civilization in its Time
of Troubles who have been evicted or annihilated by the founders of the
affiliated civilization’s universal state, or by those founders’ fore¬
runners. This retribution was exacted from the Gutaean invaders of
Sumer and Akkad by Utu-khegal of Erech, the forerunner of Ur-
Engur’s {alias Ur-Nammu’s) Sumeric ‘Empire of the Four Quarters’,
and from the Scythian invaders of South-Western Asia by the Median
forerunners of the Achaemenian Empire. We may place in the same
general category the eviction of the Afghan invaders of Iran by Nadir
Shah, and the eviction of the Mongol invaders of China by the Ming
in revenge for the intolerable service which these Eurasian Nomad bar¬
barians had performed for the main body of the Far Eastern Civilization
in imposing on it a universal state which it had failed to provide for
itself. The Serb barbarians who aspired to perform the same sen-ice
for the main body of Orthodox Christendom were overthrown, without
ever having set foot within the imperial city of Constantinople, by
'Osmanli competitors whose Spartan discipline assured their victory
over the unruly cpigoni of Stephen Dushan.

The premature timing of an offensive, which was the undoing of the
Serbs, the Scyths, and the Gutaeans, had twice been similarly fatal to
Celtic barbarian trespassers. The Continental Celts who, on the morrow
of the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization, overwhelmed the peril¬
ously exposed Etruscan advance-guard of Hellenism in the Po Basin,
and who subsequently thrust their way across Gaul into the Iberian
Peninsula and across the Balkan Peninsula into the heart of Anatolia,
were successively brought to book by the Roman builders of an Hellenic
universal state. 4 The Insular Celts who attempted to create a Far

1 Sec X. ix. 658, n. 3, and 659-62.

1 For the use of this term in this study, see pp. 580-623, below.

J See the passage quoted from Procopius in III. iii. 163.

♦ See II. ii. 279-82.

68 HEROIC AGES

Western Christian alternative to a nascent Romanesque Western Chris¬
tian Civilization found themselves constrained, like their Scandinavian
counterparts, to acquiesce in being assimilated to the more puissant
rival culture . 1 The grimmer fate that might have been theirs if they had
shown themselves recalcitrant is indicated by the chastisement that the
unconscionable Continental Saxon barbarians did incur at the hands of
a Carolingian Power which had not brushed aside the effete barbarism
of its Merovingian predecessors in order to open the way for an un¬
seasonable Saxon repetition of the Teutonic Volkerwandcrung that had
weltered, four hundred years earlier, over the western provinces of the
Roman Empire.

The fratricidal warfare, through which the barbarians save Civilization
the trouble of having to put them down by ridding the World of one
another, is perhaps the only beneficent form of ‘genocide ’. 1 By this
salutary method of progressive elimination the number of the competing
Macedonian barbarian successor-states of the Achaemenian Empire was
eventually reduced to three through the overthrow of Antigonus at
Ipsus J and of Lysimachus at Corupedium; and, by the same process,
the trio of Turkish and Tungus barbarian successor-states of the Sinic
universal state was reduced to unity within 120 years of the fall of the
regime of the United Tsin , 4 and the ‘heptarchy’ of English barbarian
successor-states of the Roman Empire in Britain was eventually con¬
verted into a ‘dyarchy’ in which the whole island, except for Wales, was
partitioned between a Wessex that had entered into the heritage of
Mercia and a Lothian that had taken its Scottish conquerors captive . 5
In the Continental European arena of a post-Hellenic barbarian Volker-
wanderung the Burgundian squatters on the left bank of the Rhine
were almost exterminated by the Western Huns—before the Hun
Power, in its turn, was broken by a revolt of its satellite Teuton war-
bands after Attila’s death—and a Burgundian remnant which had found
asylum in Savoy was subsequently subjugated there by the Merovingian
Franks . 6 The Visigoths evicted the Vandals and Alans from the Iberian

' The histories of the abortive Far Western Christian and abortive Scandinavian
civilizations have been sketched in II. ii. 322-60.

J Instances have been cited, by anticipation, in I. i. 38 and in IV. iv.

J In spite of this disaster, in which the first Antigonus met his death, his grandson
and namesake did, of course, succeed in securing for his house the throne of one of the
three surviving Macedonian polities; but the Macedonian homeland, which thus
became Antigonus Gonatas’ domain, was a modc8t prize compared with Antigonus
Monophthalmus's abortive Asiatic empire.

* Upon the collapse, at the turn of the third and fourth centuries of the Christian
Era. of the Sinic imperial regime of 'the United Tsin’, which had momentarily re¬
established the Sinic universal state in a.d. 280, after a century of disunion, three bar¬
barian wnr-bnnds carved successor-states out of the northern fringes of the former
imperial dominions: the Southern Hiongnu and the To Pa in Shansi, and the Sienpi
in Liaotung. The Hiongnu principality of 'Pei Han’ came into collision with the To Pa
in a.d. 312 (within a year of the sack of the eastern imperial capital, Loyang, by these
Hiongnu in A.D. 311). In A.D. 318 ‘Pei Han' broke up (two years after the sack of the
western imperial capital, Ch’ang-Ngan, by these Hiongnu in A.D. 316). In A.D. 338 the
Hiongnu principality was reconstituted, under the name of ‘Chao’, only to be con¬
quered in a.d. 352 by ‘Yen', the Sienpi principality in Liaotung. 'Yen’, in its turn, was •
conquered in a.d. 436 by 'Wei*—the classical name that had been assumed by the vic¬
torious principality of the Tungus To Pa (see Cordier, H.: Hutoire Gtnirale de la Chine
(Paris 1920-1. Gcuihncr. 4 vols.), vol. i. pp. 306-23). s See II. ii. 190-3.

6 In a.d. 413 the main body of the Burgundians had settled, by agreement with the

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 69
Peninsula before they were themselves evicted by the Franks from Gaul,
and they subsequently subjugated the Sueves in Galicia before being
driven, by their own Arab conquerors, into the adjoining mountain fast¬
ness of Asturias. The Arabs, on their way to conquering all but a frag¬
ment of the Iberian Peninsula from their Visigothic fellow barbarians,
subjugated in North-West Africa the Berber barbarians who had plagued
both the Romans and the Vandals with impunity.

The ‘face’ which the Roman Empire had lost when Odovacer broke
the rules of the political game in a disintegrating universal state 1 by
deposing Romulus Augustulus, the puppet emperor in the West, and
undisguisedly taking the reins of government into his own hands, was
recovered, without any military exertion on the Constantinopolitan
Imperial Government’s part, when the tactless Scirian barbarian war¬
lord Odovacer was treacherously murdered by the faithless Ostrogothic
barbarian war-lord Thcodoric. Odovacer had opened the gates of an
impregnable Ravenna to his hereditary enemy in consideration of a
solemn undertaking, on Theodoric’s part, to share the possession of
Italy with Odovacer on equal terms. Thcodoric’s murderous breach of
faith is characteristic of the methods by which the barbarian ‘heroes’
snatch an ephemeral dominion from one another; and retribution over¬
took this crime when Theodoric’s ill-gotten dominion over Italy was
wrested from his cpigoni by the Constantinopolitan Imperial Govern¬
ment that had instigated Thcodoric himself to move on to Italy from
Illyricum. In reconquering Italy from the Ostrogoths at the cost of
disastrously depleting the man-power of Illyricum and the wealth of the
Oriental provinces of the Empire, Justinian was unwittingly working,
not for himself nor for his heirs, but for the Lombard war-lord Alboin,
who was the ultimate beneficiary of the Great Romano-Gothic War of
a.d. 537-53. Before posthumously avenging the extermination of the
Ostrogoths by making an easy entry into a devastated Italy, Alboin, in
concert with the Avars, had exterminated the Ostrogoths’ kinsmen the
Gepidac, who had been the principal beneficiaries of the previous
extermination of the Avars’ fellow Nomads the Western Huns.

This auspicious proclivity of the barbarians for liquidating one
another is likewise illustrated in the histories of the break-up of the
Arab Caliphate and the break-up of the Khazar Empire in the Great
Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe. When the collapse of the Far
Western Umayyad Caliphate created a political vacuum in Andalusia
which sucked in Berber Muslim barbarians from Africa and Frankish
Christian barbarians from Europe, the Murabit Lamtuna Berber inter-

Roman authorities, on the left bank of the middle Rhine, round Worms. In a.d. 437
these Burgundians were attacked and crushed by the Huns at the instigation of the
Roman war-lord AJtius. In thus serving as the Romans’ executioners the Huns were
taking a vicarious revenge for a severe reverse that they had suffered in A.D. 430 at the
hands of a trans-Rhenane rearguard of the Burgundians in the mountainous country
between Rhine, Main, and Neckar. This obscure concatenation of inter-barbarun con¬
flicts is elucidated by E. A. Thompson: A History of Attila and the Hunt (Oxford 1948.
Clarendon Press), pp. 65-67. The Burgundians who settled in Savoy in a.d. 443 were
survivors of the disaster of A.D. 437. This Burgundy on the Rh6ne was conquered by
the Merovingians in a.d. 532.

t The role of a universal state, in the last chapter of its history, as a source of legiti¬
mization for its de facto successors has been examined in VI. vii. 12-16.

7 o HEROIC AGES

lopcrs were overthrown, as we have seen, 1 by the Muwahhid Masmuda,
and the Masmuda by the Marinid Zanata. On the frontier of a dis¬
integrating 'Abbasid Caliphate over against the Eurasian Steppe, a
Turkish wave of Nomad barbarian invaders was similarly pursued and
submerged by a following Mongol wave, while the survivors of a foun¬
dered Khazar Empire lived to witness, from their asylum in the moun¬
tain fastnesses of the Crimea, the transformation of the Khazars’ own
former imperial domain in the Eurasian Steppe’s Great Western Bay
into a maelstrom where successive waves of Magyar, Pcchcncg, Ghuzz,
Cuman, and Mongol Nomad barbarian invaders, breaking westward out
of the depths of die vast steppe-ocean, were shattered by their impact
on one another. At the Far Eastern extremity of the Old World the
Khitan Nomad invaders of a disintegrating China were evicted by the
Kin highlanders from Manchuria, as the Lamtuna Nomads were
supplanted in the Maghrib and Andalusia by the Masmuda highlanders
from the Atlas; and the Kin, in their turn, suffered at the Mongols’
hands the retribution that was meted out to the Masmuda by the
Zanata.

The ignominious fate of lingering on to be snuffed out eventually,
unregretted, by scavenger-harbingers of a resurgent civilization was re¬
served for the Kassite squatters in Babylonia; the Merovingian and
Lombard interlopers in Roman Gaul and Italy; the Umayyad successors
of the Romans tram Taurum and of the Sasanidae; the Libyan squatters
in the homeland of ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt; the Chaghatiy Mongol
Eurasian Nomad overlords of Transoxania; the Mongol U-Khans of
HOlagu’s line who had liquidated the Turkish successor-states of the
'Abbasid Caliphate, and the remnant of the 'Abbasid Power itself, in
Iran and 'Iraq; and the ‘Parthian’ Eurasian Nomad Parni who, in their
day, had wrested the same territories from the weakening grasp of the
epigoni of Seleucus Nicator. The Kassites were cleared away by native
representatives of a nascent Babylonic Civilization, the Merovingians
and the Lombard successors of Alboin by the Carolingians, the Umay-
yads by the 'Abbasids, the Libyans by the Deltaic Egyptian Pharaohs
of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty with the aid of Carian and Ionian ‘brazen
men from the sea’; the Chaghatay Mongols by Timur Lenk, the II-
Khans by a litter of ephemeral successor-states, the ‘Parthian’ Arsacidac
by the Sasanidae from Fars. The Arsacids, Umayyads, Lombards, and
Chaghatay Mongols partially retrieved the humiliation of their exit by
fighting a losing battle against their suppressors; and the survivors of
the 'Abbasids’ Umayyad victims who succeeded in re-establishing an
Umayyad Caliphate in miniature in Andalusia, beyond their KhurasanI
adversaries’ reach, were emulating the spirit of that uncharacteristically
stiff-necked minority among the descendants of the Libyan squatters in
Egypt who preferred to trek up the Nile into the Sudanese Gazfrah
rather than submit to the rule of the apostles of an archaising Egyptiac
reaction. 2 A majority of the Libyan trespassers in Egypt preferred, like
the Kassites and the Merovingians, to die ‘the cow’s death’ that, in the

1 On p. 49, above.

1 This incident has been touched upon in VI. vii. 1x8-19.

THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 71
barbarian’s own eyes, is the worst disgrace that he can bring upon
himself.

The only barbarians who had escaped all these alternative evil ends
were those whose incursion into the domain of a disintegrating civiliza¬
tion beyond a fallen limes had been accompanied by their conversion to
some still vigorous civilization in their rear. The Macedonians, for
example, were Greek-speaking barbarians' who had been exposed to
the radiation of the Hellenic Civilization, created by the Greek city-
states round the shores of the Aegean, for many generations before the
date of Alexander’s crossing of the Hellespont. The deliberate Helleniza-
tion of Macedonia by Alexander’s father Philip was the prelude to the
Macedonians’ conquest of the Achaemcnian Empire as apostles of
Hellenism; and, though, as we have seen, the Achaemenian Empire’s
Macedonian successor-states all, in different ways, displayed the
political instability that is characteristic of principalities set up by
barbarian war-bands, these peritura regna did, nevertheless, succeed in
performing one piece of creative work in sowing seeds of Hellenism on
Oriental ground that were subsequently harvested by the Roman
Empire. This Macedonian story had been repeated in the cultural his¬
tory of the Asturian and Pyrenaean barbarians who had emulated the
Macedonians’ feat of overrunning the domains of several disintegrating
civilizations. 2 The Visigoth refugees in Asturias and their Basque neigh¬
bours in the Western Pyrenees started life imbued with a tincture of a
then already nascent Western Christian Civilization; and this tincture
was successively reinforced in the ninth century of the Christian Era,
when the southern foothills of the Central and Eastern Pyrenees were
conquered from the Umayyads by the Carolingians, and in the eleventh
century, when Lconesc and Castilian war-bands began to encroach in
earnest on the indigenous successor-states of an Andalusian Umayyad
Caliphate.

‘When in a.d. 1002 Northern Spain eventually emancipated herself
from Islam, she applied herself to the task of restoring her weakened links
with the rest of Europe. The liturgy, clergy, monasteries, handwriting-
all her institutions and customs—were reformed in the time of the Cid
and brought into line with the standards prevailing in Western Europe.
This great change was helped forward by the influx of knights, clerics,
burghers and settlers from beyond the Pyrenees, who filled the places of
those inhabitants of Castile and Leon who had moved southwards.’ 3

In a similar way the Scandinavian barbarian intruders on the forest
fringes of the Khazar Empire in the Dnicpr Basin were salvaged by their
conversion to Eastern Orthodox Christianity; the Cossack barbarians
who followed the Russian rivers out of the Forest into the Steppe and
ventured to beard the epigoni of the Golden Horde on the Eurasian

* See III. iii. 477-89. . .

i The Macedonians overran the domains of the Hittite, Syriac, Egypnac, Babylonic,
and Indie civilizations; the Spaniards overran the domains of the Syriac Civilization in
the Iberian Peninsula and of the Central American and Andean civilizations in the
New World. . .

> Menendez Pidal, Ramdn: The Cid and His Spain, English translation (London 1934,
Murray), p. 452. See also the present Study, V. v. 242, n. 4.

72 HEROIC AGES

Nomads’ own element were incorporated into the universal state which
was provided for the Russian offshoot of Orthodox Christendom by
Muscovy; and the Serb and the Rumeliot and Maniot Greek barbarian
carvers of successor-states out of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire
were converted in the act, more Macedonico, to the secular civilization
of a Modem Western World. 1

These instances of salvation through conversion, rare though they
arc, show that even the barbarian interloper on the domain of a mori¬
bund civilization is not inexorably doomed.

1 See II. ii. 181-6.

E. DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT

(I) A PHANTASY OF HEROISM

J F there is truth in the picture presented in the preceding chapter, the
verdict on the Heroic Age can only be a severe one. The mildest
judgement will convict it of having been a futile escapade, while sterner
judges will denounce it as a criminal outrage.

The verdict of futility was once pronounced, in tragic circumstances,
by a conquered barbarian war-lord whose previous station and sub¬
sequent personal experiences entitled him to speak on this point with
unchallengeable authority. In a . d . 534 Gelimir, the ex-king of an
ephemeral Vandal barbarian successor-state of the Roman Empire in
North-West Africa, could not forget, while he was dragging his feet
through the streets of Constantinople in a Roman triumphal procession
to celebrate his own overthrow, that he was the fifth successor of a
Genscric who had conquered Carthage less than a hundred years back 1
and had sacked Rome herself in a . d . 455.

'The prisoners led in triumph were Gelimir himself, with a purple
robe of some sort draped round his shoulders, and the whole of his family,
together with the very tallest and physically handsomest of the Vandal
rank-and-file. When Gelimir had arrived at the Hippodrome and beheld
the Emperor enthroned on a lofty tribune, with the people standing on
either side of him, and when, as he took in the scene, he realised the ex¬
tremity of his own plight, he did not relieve his feelings by weeping or
groaning aloud, but repeated over and over again a phrase from the
Hebrew scriptures: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” 1 When he reached
the Emperor’s tribune they stripped him of his purple and forced him
to fall on his face and grovel in adoration of Justinian’s imperial majesty
(TTpoOKWtiv ‘Iovonvtavov fiaatAea ).' 3

If the unhappy Gelimir had been further humiliated on that day by
being made to carry a placard epitomizing his experience, the Roman
official epigrammatist commissioned to compose the headline could not
have done better than to anticipate three lines written by a latter-day
Western poet:

Sown in the Moon shall with the Moon decay,

Loved in the Moon shall die at touch of day;

And spring be cold, and roses ashen grey.*

And the same stark verdict of futility likewise makes itself heard
through the mellow poetry of a Victorian man of letters who had lived
on to feel the frost of a neo-barbarian age.

Follow the path of those fair warriors, the tall Goths
from the day when they led their blue-eyed families

« The Vandals had conquered Carthage in A.D. 439 . only ten years after their passage,
in A.D. 429, from Spain to Africa. 1 Ecd. i. 2. .

> Procopius: A History of the Wars of Justinian, Book IV, chap. 0, cited in IV. iv. 389.
* Gilbert Murray, on the title-page of Moonseed, by Rosalind Murray (London 19x1,
Sidgwick and Jackson).

HEROIC AGES

off Vistula’s cold pasture-lands, their murky home
by the amber-strewen foreshore of the Baltic sea,
and, in the incontaminat vigor of manliness
feeling their rumour’d way to an unknown promised land,
tore at the ravel’d fringes of the purple power,
and trampling its wide skirts, defeating its armies,
slaying its Emperor, and burning his cities,
sack’d Athens and Rome; untill supplanting Caesar
they ruled the world where Romans reigned before:—

Yet from those three long centuries of rapin and blood,
inhumanity of heart and wanton cruelty of hand,
ther is little left. . . . Those Goths wer strong but to destroy;
they neither wrote nor wrought, thought not nor created;
but, since the field was rank with tares and mildew’d wheat,
their scything won some praise: Else have they left no trace. 1

This measured judgement, which is the ripe fruit of a still undisturbed
detachment from the realities of the Heroic Age, could not have been
delivered by an Hellenic poet who was bitterly conscious of still living
in a moral slum made by barbarian successors of ‘the thalassocracy of
Minos’. Criminality, and not mere futility, is the burden of Hesiod’s
indictment against a post-Minoan heroic age that, in his day, was still
haunting a nascent Hellenic Civilization; and, if he had been required
to give his black picture a ‘caption’, we may guess that he would have
quoted from the Odyssey 2 the goddess Athena’s comment on Zeus’s talc
of Aegisthus.

Kal Xlrjv kciv6 $ ioiKOTt Ktirai SX 49 pip‘
u>s dnoXoiro scat aAAor ort? roiaura ye p«'£oi. 3

Hesiod’s own judgement on the barbarians is indeed a merciless one:

‘And Father Zeus made yet a third race of mortal men—a Race of
Bronze, in no wise like unto the Silver, fashioned from ash-stems, 4
mighty and terrible. Their delight was in the grievous deeds of Ares and
in the trespasses of Pride (ufjpies). No bread ever passed their lips, but
their hearts in their breasts were strong as adamant, and none might
approach them. Great was their strength and unconquerable were the
arms which grew from their shoulders upon their stalwart frames. Of
bronze were their panoplies, of bronze their houses, and with bronze
they tilled the land (dark iron was not yet). These were brought low by
their own hands and went their way to the mouldering house of chilly
Hades, nameless. For all their mighty valour, Death took them in his
dark grip, and they left the bright light of the Sun.’*

In Posterity’s judgement on the overflowing measure of suffering
which the barbarians bring upon themselves by their own criminal

* Bridges, Robert: The Testament of Beauty (Oxford 1929, Clarendon Press), Book I,
U- S 35 - 55 - 1 Book I, II. 46-47-

» 'AH too [fearfully] befitting i* the doom that has laid that monster low; thus perish
any other wretch who dares such deeds ns those.’ The second of these two lines was
quoted by Scipio Aemilianus when, in his camp beleaguering Numantia, he received
intelligence of the violent end which Tiberius Gracchus had met at Rome (Plutarch:
Life of Tiberius Gracchus, chap. 2t).

4 Ash was the wood from which spear-shafts were made.—A.T.T.
i Hesiod: Works and Days, II. 143-55.

A PHANTASY OF HEROISM 75

follies, 1 this passage in Hesiod’s poem might have stood as the last word,
had not the poet himself run on as follows:

'Now when this race also had been covered by Earth, yet a fourth race
was made, again, upon the face of the All-Mother, by Zeus son of Cronos
—a better race and more righteous, the divine race of men heroic (dvBp&v
r/pioiov Oetou y(vos), who are called demigods ('qp.ideoi), a race that was
aforetime upon the boundless Earth. These were destroyed by evil War
and dread Battle—some below Seven-Gate Thebes in the land of Cad¬
mus, as they fought for the flocks of Oedipus, while others were carried
for destruction to Troy in ships over the great gulf of the sea, for the sake
of Helen of the lovely hair. There verily they met their end and vanished
in the embrace of Death; yet a few there were that were granted a life and
a dwelling-place, apart from Mankind, by Zeus son of Cronos, who made
them to abide at the ends of the Earth. So there they abide, with hearts
free from care, in the Isles of the Blessed beside the deep eddies of Ocean
Stream—happy heroes, for whom a harvest honey-sweet, thrice ripening
every year, is yielded by fruitful fields.’*

What is the relation of this passage to the one that immediately pre¬
cedes it, and indeed to the whole catalogue of races in which it is
imbedded ? This episode breaks the sequence of the catalogue in two
respects. In the first place the race here passed in review, unlike the pre¬
ceding races of gold, silver, and bronze and the succeeding race of iron,
is not identified with any metal, and, in the second place, all the other
four races are made to follow one another in a declining order of merit
which is symbolized in the descending gradation of the metals from gold
to iron through silver and bronze. Moreover, the destinies of the three
preceding races after death are consonant with the tenour of their lives
on Earth. The Race of Gold 'became good spirits (S alpoves ... iadXol)
by the will of great Zeus—spirits above the ground, guardians of mortal
men, givers of wealth (for they had gotten even that prerogative of
kings).’ 3 The inferior Race of Silver still 'gained among mortals the
name of blessed ones beneath the ground—second in glory; and yet,
even so, they too are attended with honour’. 4 When we come, however,
to the Race of Bronze, wc find, as we have seen, that their fate after
death is passed over in a grimly ominous silence. In a catalogue woven
on this pattern, we should expect to find the next race condemned, after
death, to suffer, at the lightest, the torments of the damned in the House
of Hades; yet, so far from that, wc find at least a chosen few of them
transported after death, not to Hell, but to Elysium—where they live,
above ground, the very life that had been lived by the Race of Gold
before tasting of a death which these supremely favoured heroes are, it
would seem, to be spared.

Manifestly the insertion of a Race of Heroes between the Race of
Bronze and the Race of Iron is an afterthought. Both in form and in
substance the passages describing the races of these two baser metals

1 edva iv araaOaXhjmv vtt ip popov aXy< fv ovaiv, — Odyssey, Book 1,1. 34. _

> Hesiod: Works and Days, II. 156-73. following Rzach, A.: Httiodi Carmina, edit 10
altera (Leipzig 1908, Teubner), in excising II. 169-9* as a later variant for II. 172-3-

J Hesiod: Works and Days, 11. 122-6, following Rzach in excising II. 124-5.

* Ibid., II. 141-2.

76 HEROIC AGES

ought to stand in immediate juxtaposition to one another. If we do
bring them together by allowing the episode of the heroes to drop out,
the poem then runs smooth, with no perceptible hiatus at the point where
we have excised the incongruous parenthesis. The parenthetic heroes
break the poem’s sequence, symmetry, and sense; and this discord must
have grated as painfully on the aesthetic sensibilities of the poet as it
grates on ours. What moved the poet to make this clumsy insertion at
this cost to his work of art ? The answer must be that the picture, here
presented, of a Race of Heroes was so vividly impressed on the imagina¬
tion of the poet and his public that some place had to be found for it in
any catalogue of the successive ages in their vista of past history; and
the irony of the poet's predicament is that this massacre of a work of
art for the sake of paying tribute to an historical reminiscence turns out
really to have been an unnecessary atrocity. It was unnecessary because
the Race of Heroes was already ensconced in the original catalogue under
the sign of the third metal of the four. In other words, the Race of
Heroes is identical with the Race of Bronze; and the insertion describing
the heroes is thus, in truth, not an indispensable supplement, but a
superfluous doublet.

The identity of the two races becomes transparent as soon as we com¬
pare the two passages. In the first place the Heroes’ unnamed metal
must, in fact, be bronze, since iron only comes in with their successors,
while their brazen predecessors have already superseded the earlier
races of silver and gold; and in truth the Homeric Epic is corroborated
by the researches of Modern Western archaeologists in setting the
Achaean heroes of a post-Minoan Volkerwanderung in the techno¬
logical environment of the Bronze Age. In the second place the ascrip¬
tion of the responsibility for the destruction of the Heroes to the
ostensibly impersonal demonic forces of ‘War’ and ‘Battle’ is manifestly
a euphemistic periphrasis for the poet’s previous brutal statement of the
truth that the Race of Bronze ‘were brought low by their own hands’.
The nameless fratricidal struggles in which the brazen men liquidate
themselves are none other than the wars in which the Heroes are
destroyed at the gates of Thebes and under the walls of Troy—and
therewith the curtain falls on the war-ridden lives, not only of the Men
of Bronze, but likewise of the Heroes with the exception of a privileged
(•lite. The majority of the Heroes, who ‘met their end’ in warfare ‘and
vanished in the embrace of Death’, are the self-same brazen warriors
who ‘left the bright light of the Sun’ and ‘went their way to the moulder¬
ing house of chilly Hades, nameless’, when ‘Death took them in his
dark grip’. If we leave out of account Menelaus and the handful of
other fortunate Heroes whom Zeus, in his sovereign caprice, has elected
to transport to Elysium, the deeds and sufferings and destinies of the two
races, as described by the poet in these passages, prove, on examination,
to be the same.

This discovery is surprising, because the impression made on our
minds by the two passages, before we thus analyse them, is one not of
identity but of contrast; and the difference, as well as the likeness, is
indeed a reality; but, in distinction from the likeness, which is a likeness

A PHANTASY OF HEROISM 77

of statements about alleged matters of fact, the difference is a difference
of aesthetic and emotional atmosphere. The Race of Bronze and the
Race of Heroes are the same people seen through different mental glasses:
a lens of faint yet authentic historical reminiscence and a lens of vivid
but hallucinatory poetic imagination. A single race has, in fact, been
portrayed by the poet twice over in two pictures which he has been con¬
strained to present side by side because he is afflicted—or endowed—
with an astigmatic vision which he is unable to reduce to a single focus.

How has this dual vision arisen ? An answer to this riddle is suggested
by a literary phenomenon which we have already had occasion to notice
in another context. 1 We have observed that an historical personage or
event that happens also to become a character or topic of ‘heroic’ poetry
or saga acquires, in this ‘other world’ of the barbarian poetic imagination,
a life of its own whose career, as it develops, is apt to part company with
the statically authentic historical facts of ‘real life’ until sometimes the
original identity of the two pictures is almost entirely obscured—as can
be verified in cases in which the historical truth or falsehood of the
barbarian poet’s picture can be gauged by comparison with the prosaic
statements of some historian, belonging to a neighbouring civilization,
who is, himself, a contemporary of the facts that he has put on record.
On this analogy we may perhaps explain the puzzling dittography in our
Hesiodic catalogue of the successive races of men by concluding that,
in this canto, the poet has played for us the historian’s part as well as
his own. In his grim delineation of the Race of Bronze he has given
us, in advance, the prose version of his immediately following poetic
idyll of a Race of Heroes—a fantasy in which the sordid historical facts
have undergone their characteristic metamorphosis in the radio-active
medium of a Homeric poetical tradition to which Hesiod is the heir.

It would be an error, of course, to suppose that our conscientious
Hesiod is deliberately laying a glossy coat of moral whitewash over his
heroes’ crude historical criminality. His presentation of the damning
truth side by side with an ideal picture is evidence of his naive good
faith; and, indeed, we have noticed above 2 that the barbarian bard who
has posthumously made a Hesiod his dupe is quite as ready to paint his
picture darker than the reality of his living model as he is to paint it
lighter. The notorious creation, in the Nibelungenlied, of an imaginary
paladin, Dietrich of Bern, out of an historical Theodoric who, ‘in real
life’, won Verona by his treacherous murder of Odovaccr, is offset by
the transformation of respectable historical characters into villains. The
Classical School of Serb ‘heroic’ poetry, which made the counterpart of
an imaginary chivalrous Dietrich out of the historical traitor Marko
Kraljevid, simultaneously made the counterpart of an authentic dastardly
Theodoric out of the historical paladin Vuk Brankovid. 3 The epic poet|s
concern is, not for his heroes’ and heroines’ moral reputation, but for his
poetry’s aesthetic merit; and even in this endeavour, professionally in
earnest though he is, he is at the same time entirely unselfconscious.

This admirable unselfconsciousness is one of the secrets of the epic
poet’s dazzling artistic success; and this triumph of a barbarian art is

« In V. v. 607-14. 2 On p. 61, above. 1 See V. v. 609.

78 HEROIC AGES

the solitary creative achievement amid the welter of catastrophic failures
which a barbarian war-band brings upon itself when it steps across a
fallen limes to make a moral slum out of the social ruins among which it
squats. In politics, in religion, and in all the other fields in which the
barbarians have shown rudimentary’ signs of possessing creative power
so long as they have been pent back behind the ft/w^-barrage, 1 these
rudiments of creativity arc blighted, as we have seen, 2 by the de¬
moralization that overtakes the barbarians when the collapse of the limes
spills them out of Limbo into the Promised Land. In the slum of a bar¬
barian successor-state the barbarian’s embryonic gift for poetry is the
only one of his potentialities that comes to flower; and this bud blossoms
so wonderfully that it lends the waste-land the illusory appearance of a
paradise. The barbarian bard’s magically successful art casts over the
barbarian war-lord’s commonplace misconduct and failure ‘in real life’
a glamour that deludes a captivated Posterity—as our physical vision is
enraptured by the irridescent colours that radiate, in patterns of in¬
imitable harmony, over the surface of a broken piece of Roman glass or
of a puddle of oil that has collected in a pot-hole from the leaking
sump of some limping car. 3

In social terms the Heroic Age is a great folly, and an even greater
crime; but in emotional terms it is a great experience: the thrilling ex¬
perience of breaking through a barrier which has baffled the barbarian
invaders’ forebears for many generations past, and bursting out into an
apparently boundless world that offers what seem to be infinite possi¬
bilities. With one glorious exception, all these possibilities turn out, as
we have seen, to be Dead Sea fruit; the barbarian w r ar-lords and
warriors throw away their splendid opportunities in crimes and follies
that swiftly revenge themselves; yet this sensational completeness of the
barbarians’ misconduct and failure on the social and political planes
paradoxically ministers to the success of their bards’ creative work; for
in art, in illuminating antithesis to ‘practical life’, there is more to be
made out of failure than out of success. 4

The exhilaration generated by the experience of the Vdlkerwandcrung

* See pp. 9 -xo, above. . . a On pp. 46-47, above.

* To be transfigured by this poetic glamour in the imagination of contemporarie*
and epigoni was the supreme ambition of the barbarian war-lord—the one prize acces¬
sible to him that, in his disillusioned eyes, still shone like gold against the drab foil of a
material power and wealth which had been proved mockingly unrewarding by a bitter
experience of tasting their fruits and finding them dust and ashes. The poet’s tenure of
the keys of the war-lord’s hall of fame, which was the only heaven to which the war-lord
aspired, conferred on the poet a potential political ‘puli' which the sophisticated war¬
lord Mu’iwiyah had the acumen to appreciate and the adroitness to turn to his own
account (sec Lammens, S.J., Lc Pere H.: fitudes sur le Regne du Calife Mo'duia I"
(Paris 1908, Geuthnerk pp. 252-66).

* On this point see V. v. 607-14. This truth is illustrated, not only by the choice of
themes in the primary epic poetry that is evoked by a barbarian Vdlkerwandcrung, but
also by the history of the secondary epic poetry in which a sophisticated civilization
proclaims its admiration for a barbamn art by trying its hand at an artificial reproduction
of the barbarian poet’s genre. Like the original epic, the literary epic is apt to be the
swan-song of an age that is petering out in disillusionment and failure—as has been
pointed out by C. M. Bowra in From Virgil to Milton (London 1945, Macmillan), pp.
28-32. This creative potentiality’ of failure, which had thus proved itself a gold mine for
poets who worked it as a vein of inspiration, was also, of course, one of the mysteries
that had been revealed in the higher religions through the passions of the Prophets and
the Saints.

A PHANTASY OF HEROISM 79

—an exhilaration that breaks down into demoralization in the intoxi¬
cated souls of the barbarian men of action—inspires the barbarian poet
serenely to transmute the memory of his heroes’ wickedness and in¬
eptitude into a song that will live on Posterity’s lips. In the enchanted
realm of a poetry that thus magically transfigures the sordid crimes and
follies by which it is evoked, the barbarian conquistadores achieve
vicariously the success that eludes their grasp in real life; and herein the
bard does the hero an even greater sen-ice than Horace avers. 1 He does
not merely preserve his subject’s memory; he actually creates his charac¬
ter by making dead history blossom into immortal romance; and, while
the effect, as often as not, on his hero’s moral reputation may be to pre¬
sent him as a blacker villain than he has actually shown himself to be
while he has been rollicking, in flesh and blood, across the stage of
History, one invariable result of the poet’s artistic alchemy is to enhance
immeasurably the aesthetic attractiveness of the historical lay figure that
he has taken as his cobbler’s last. Thanks to the barbarian poet’s
wizardry the squalid realities of the barbarian warrior’s slum exhale a
phantasy of heroism that long outlives its ephemeral source in the sump
of authentic history.

This pearl of Barbarism is appreciated and appropriated by a Posterity
that has little use for anything else in the barbarian’s otherwise un¬
inviting legacy; and the barbarian bard, in the posthumous literary life
that is thus conferred on him by the canonization of his works, slily
avenges his discreditable comrades the barbarian war-lord and warrior
by investing them with an unmerited reputation through an artistic con¬
juring trick. The fascination exercised by heroic poetry over its latter-
day admirers deludes them, as we have observed, 1 into mistaking an
Heroic Age which is the changeling child of a poet’s imagination for the
very different historical reality by which the poet’s creative activity has
been called into play. The poet’s magic touch conjures a 'light that
never was, on sea or land’, 3 out of the baleful glare of a conflagration
kindled by the barbarian incendiaries of a devastated world; and this
theatrical lighting makes a slum look like Valhalla.

The earliest victim of this illusion is, as we have seen, 4 the poet of a
Dark Age which is ‘the Heroic Age’s' sequel. As is manifest in retro¬
spect, this later age has no need to be ashamed of a darkness which
signifies that the barbarian incendiaries’ bonfire has at last burnt itself
out; and, though, after the expiry of that ghastly artificial illumination, a
bed of ashes smothers the surface of the flame-seared ground, the Dark
Age proves to be as creative as 'the Heroic Age’ has been destructive.
When the fire is extinct and the clamour hushed, the Spirit moves again
upon the face of the waters; and, in the fullness of time, new life duly
arises from the abyss to clothe the fertile ash-field with shoots of tender
green. The poetry of Hesiod is one of these harbingers of a returning
spring-time; yet this honest chanticleer of the darkness before dawn is
still so blindly infatuated with a poetry inspired by an act of nocturnal

* Horace: Comma, Book IV, Ode ix. * On p. 78, above.

» Wordsworth, William: Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture o] Peele Castle in a
Storm. * On p. 57. above.

80 HEROIC AGES ‘

incendiarism that he takes on faith, as gospel truth, an imaginary Homeric
picture of a Race of Heroes and is consequently betrayed into despairing
of the age of promise into which he himself has been born—without
realizing that any age of history that is experienced ‘in real life’ is bound
to seem desperately inferior to an Heroic Age whose idyllic beauty has
never had any existence outside a barbarian poet's imagination.

Hesiod’s illusion seems strange, considering that, in his picture of the
Race of Bronze, he has preserved for us, side by side with his confiding
reproduction of an Homeric fantasy, a merciless portrait of the barbarian
as he really is. Yet, even without this clue, the heroic myth can be ex¬
ploded by detonating the internal evidence. The Heroes turn out, as we
have perceived, to live the evil lives and die the cruel deaths of the Race
of Bronze, and Valhalla turns out likewise to be a slum when we switch
off all the artificial lights and scrutinize dispassionately, in the sober
light of day, this poetic idealization of the riotous feasting and turbulent
fighting that, between them, make up the historical barbarians’ daily
round and common task. The warriors who qualify for admission to
Valhalla by losing their lives in battle are in truth identical with the
demons against whom they are called upon to exercise their prowess as
members of Odin’s ghostly war-band; and, in perishing from off the face
of the Earth by mutual destruction, the Vikings have already done their
best to relieve the World of a pandemonium of their own making by
staging a ragnarok with an ending that is a happy one from every point
of view except their own. In the Aesir’s mythical last stand, Odin and
his divine comitatus are Doppelgtinger of the overwhelming powers of
darkness to which they are fabled to succumb; for this heroic forlorn
hope is the cunning sagaman’s version of Odin’s ‘Wild Ride’—a tempes¬
tuous rout of unbridled passion that brings doom on any unhappy mortal
who happens to be caught in its hideous blast.

The hallucination to which a Hesiod succumbs in the archaic prelude
to a nascent civilization can also take in a sceptical historian in the
sophisticated intellectual environment of a civilization that has reached,
and perhaps passed, its maturity—as is attested by the following passage
which Gibbon has allowed himself to write in The History of the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire:

‘The sublime Longinus, who ... in the court of a Syrian queen
preserved the spirit of ancient Athens, observes and laments [the]
degeneracy of his contemporaries, which debased their sentiments, en¬
ervated their courage, and depressed their talents. "In the same manner,”
says he, "as some children always remain pigmies, whose infant limbs
have been too closely confined; thus our tender minds, fettered by the
prejudices and habits of a just servitude, arc unable to expand themselves, 1
or to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we admire in the
Ancients, who, living under a popular government, wrote with the same
freedom as they acted.” This diminutive stature of Mankind, if we pur-

* °*' v ' • • • rovroviorov a«ov<o, ra y\ajTr6x0fia, Iv oU oi rrvyuatoi xaXov/u-

i-oc 6i vfo* vpe^ovrax, oii fioVov rwv iynttcXturjUvotv Tat aiSfyans, dMa teal

otvapoc [?1 Sid rov ircpiKuutvov rots oat/iaot Stoftov, oCrag, anaoav tovMlav, xav f)
dutaiOTdrrj, VL'X’li yXwrroKOttov xai xotro k ai- nf anoStvruro &*oua>Ap Longi¬
nus l?]: / 7 <pl Ytfov t. chap, xliv, § 5.

A PHANTASY OF HEROISM 81

sue the metaphor, was daily sinking below the old standard, and the
Roman World was indeed peopled by a race of pigmies, when the fierce
giants of the North broke in and mended the puny breed. They restored
a manly spirit of freedom; and, after the revolution of ten centuries,
freedom became the happy parent of taste and science.’ 1

After this awe-inspiring exhibition of the barbarian poet-conjurer’s
power to hoax a giant eighteenth-century intellect, we can hardly be
surprised to see a nineteenth-century philosopher-mountebank launch¬
ing his myth of a salutarily barbarian ‘Nordic Race’ whose blood—
unique in this among all brews of human ichor—acts as an infallible
elixir of youth when it is injected into the veins of an ‘effete’ society. 2 Yet
we may still be cut to the heart as we watch the lively French aristocrat’s
political jeu d'esprit being keyed up into a racial myth by the criminal
prophets of a demonic German Neobarbarism that surpasses in wicked¬
ness the original Barbarism which it seeks to revive in the measure in which
a wilful apostate from a higher religious faith surpasses in perversity
the invincibly ignorant heathen. 3

(II) A GENUINE HUMBLE SERVICE

While the criminality of a barbarian Vdlkerwanderung can thus work
posthumous moral havoc on the strength of its brilliant poetic mas¬
querade as an idyllic heroism, there have also been occasions on which
an unbridled barbarian interloper has performed a humble service for
Posterity that proves, in retrospect, to have been of genuine value. At
the transition from the civilizations of the first generation to those of the
second, the interloping barbarian war-bands that established themselves
in a dying civilization’s former domain did in some cases provide a link
between the defunct civilization and its newborn successor, as, in the
subsequent transition from the civilizations of the second generation to
those of the third, a link was provided by chrysalis-churches created by
the secondary civilizations’ internal proletariats. 4 The Syriac and Hellenic
civilizations, for instance, were thus linked with an antecedent Minoan
Civilization through this Minoan Society’s external proletariat, and the
Hittite Civilization stood in the same historical relation to an antecedent
Sumeric Civilization, the Indie Civilization to an antecedent Indus
Culture (supposing that this Indus Culture were to turn out to have
been independent of the Sumeric Civilization), and the Sinic Civilization
to an antecedent Shang Culture (supposing that the progress of archaeo¬
logical research were to confirm this Shang Culture’s title to rank as a
full-blown civilization of the first generation).

The modesty of the service that these particular barbarian war-bands

» Gibbon, E.: TheHiitoryof the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, ti, ad fin,

1 The fallacy of ascribing to societies a senescence that is a property' of individual
living organisms has been criticized in IV. iv. 7-13.

J Count de Gobineau’s fantasy and its consequences in real life have been touched
upon in II. i. 216-xo.

* Sec the table of primitive societies, civilizations, and higher religions, nrranged in
serial order, facing p. 47 of volume vii.

82 HEROIC AGES

performed is brought out by our comparison of it with the role of
the chrysalis-churches. While the Internal Proletariat that builds the
churches, like the External Proletariat that breeds the war-bands, is the
offspring of a psychological secession from a disintegrating civilization,
and while neither branch of the Proletariat carries this repudiation of
its former cultural allegiance so far as to make no use at all of the
Dominant Minority’s cultural heritage in creating the rudiments of a
new culture with a distinctive character of its own, the Internal Prole¬
tariat is apt to make a much greater success than the External Proletariat
ever makes of the cultural enterprise of 'spoiling the Egyptians’. In the
higher religions which had been the Internal Proletariat’s chefs-d'auvre,
the cultural spoils of a disintegrating civilization had been transmuted
into new creations to a far greater extent, and with a far more telling
effect, than in the new social and political institutions, the new religions,
or even the new poetry of the barbarians beyond the pale; and this
difference in degree of cultural assimilative power could be gauged by
the difference iii the strength of the link between a successor civilization
and its predecessor when this link had been supplied by a chrysalis-
church and when it had been supplied by a barbarian war-band.

For example, the Orthodox Christian and the Western Civilization,
which were affiliated to the antecedent Hellenic Civilization through the
Christian Church, had always been on far more intimate terms with their
Hellenic predecessor than the Hellenic Civilization ever had been with
a Minoan predecessor with which it had been affiliated solely through
the Achaean barbarians. Through this non-conductivc barbarian
medium the Hellenic Civilization’s reception of the antecedent Minoan
Civilization’s posthumous radiation of its cultural influence had been
so faint and fragmentary that, in contrast to the Christian civilizations'
intimacy with an antecedent Hellenism, the Hellenic Civilization gave
the impression of being oblivious of its Minoan predecessor. It was, in¬
deed, so little conscious of its Minoan antecedents that it might almost
be mistaken—as its two ‘Hellenistic’ Christian successors never could
be—for one of those civilizations of the earliest generation that had had
no previous civilization at all in their cultural background. The Hellenic
Society’s living cultural heritage from the Achaean barbarians included
no institutions of Minoan or post-Minoan origin, and no authentic con¬
temporary records of any periods of the antecedent civilization’s history.
The sole fount of Hellenic knowledge of a pre-Hellenic past was the
Homeric Epic; and, for the history of an antecedent civilization, the

S bequeathed by barbarians is a doubly deceptive source of in¬
ion. In general the barbarian poet creates his work of art by taking
unlimited liberties with the record of authentic facts; 1 and, in particular,
this intuitive artistic criterion governing the poet’s treatment of his
subject leads him to ignore the moribund civilization whose death
agonies have precipitated the barbarian Volkerwanderung as a matter
of historical fact, but whose tragedy is incomprehensible to barbarian
minds. 2 Eschewing such intractable matter, the barbarian bard presents
the barbarian Heroic Age in vacuo , with no more than a casual reference,

1 See V. v. 607-14. «nd pp. 77-79, above. a Sec V. v. 610-14.

A GENUINE HUMBLE SERVICE 83

here and there, to the mighty carcass on which the bard’s vulture-
heroes have gathered together to make their carrion feasts.

On this showing, the service with which we have credited the
Achacans and the other barbarians of their generation who played the
same transmissive role might seem at first sight to dwindle almost to
vanishing-point. What did it really amount to? Its reality becomes evi¬
dent when we compare the destinies of those civilizations of the second
generation that were affiliated to predecessors by this tenuous barbarian
link with the destinies of the rest of the secondary civilizations. As we
have observed in previous contexts, 1 any secondary civilizations that
were not affiliated to their primary predecessors through these pre¬
decessors’ external proletariats were affiliated to them through their
dominant minorities; and these were the only two alternative lines of
affiliation in this chapter of history, since no chrysalis-churches came
out of the rudimentary higher religions—a worship of Tammuz and
Ishtar and a worship of Osiris and Isis—that had been created or
adopted by some of the primary civilizations’ internal proletariats.
Secondary civilizations affiliated through external proletariats and
secondary civilizations affiliated through dominant minorities are the
only civilizations of this generation that are known to us; and, when we
compare these two types, we observe a difference in their destinies corres¬
ponding to a difference in their characters.

In character these two types of secondary civilization stand at oppo¬
site poles. Whereas those secondary civilizations that were affiliated
through external proletariats were connected with their predecessors by
a link that is so tenuous that it hardly serves to distinguish them from
civilizations of the primary class that had no predecessors at all of their
own social species, the rest of the secondary civilizations, which were
affiliated through dominant minorities, were, on the other hand, so
closely welded thereby to their predecessors of the first generation that
we have found ourselves wondering whether we ought not to treat their
histories as mere epilogues to those of the antecedent civilizations in¬
stead of according them the status of separate civilizations with histories
of their own. 2 Whichever of the two possible answers to this question
may be the nearer to the truth, there is no ambiguity about the destinies
of these ‘supra-affiliated secondary civilizations’ or ‘dead trunks of
primary civilizations’—to give the societies of this type their two alter¬
native labels. There were three known examples of the type—the
Babylonic Civilization, affiliated to the Sumcric Civilization, and the
Yucatcc and Mcxic civilizations, affiliated to the Mayan—and none of
these three ‘supra-affiliated secondary civilizations’ had come to serve,
in its disintegration, as the chrysalis of any living higher religion. All the
living higher religions had been created by the internal proletariats of
other civilizations of the second generation—the Syriac Civilization, the
Hellenic, the Indie, the Sinic—whose own affiliation with their pre¬
decessors of the first generation had run, not through the Dominant
Minority, but through the External Proletariat.

« In I. i. 115-18 and 131-2. and VII. vii. 421. above.

* Thi* question has been raised in I. i. x 17-18 and 133-6.

8 4 HEROIC AGES

If we call to mind, in this connexion, our conclusion, reached in the
preceding Part of this Study, 1 that our serial order of chronologically
successive types of society is at the same time an ascending order of
value, in which the higher religions would be the highest term so far
attained, we shall now bbserve that the barbarian chrysalises of civiliza¬
tions of the second generation would have to their credit the honour of
having participated in the higher religions' procreation. They would
have been, so to speak, the higher religions’ ‘grandparents’; 2 for the
higher religions that had come to flower had all been created by the
internal proletariats of civilizations of the second generation which had
been affiliated with their own predecessors of the first generation through
barbarian war-bands. These contributions of these barbarians to the
geneses of the higher religions can be conveyed most simply and clearly
in the form of genealogical tables.

The Minonn Civilization

The post-Minoan barbarians
(Philistines, Achaeans)

The Syriac Civilization
Istam

(derived from
the Syriac
Civilization
through ita
internal pro¬
letariat)

The Hellenic

The Indus Culture

The post-Indus Culture
barbarians (Aryas)

Civilization The Indie Civilization

Christianity
(derived from
the Hellenic
Civilization
through it*
internal pro¬
letariat)

The MahflyAna Hindi

. ina
(derived from
the Hellenic
and Indie
Civilizations
through their
internal pro¬
letariats)

uiam
(derived from
the Indie
Civilization
through its
internal pro¬
letariat)

If the failures of the civilizations of the first generation to produce
full-fledged higher religions had been followed only by the geneses of
secondary civilizations affiliated to their primary predecessors solely
through these predecessors’ dominant minorities, the actual subsequent
sterility of all the secondary civilizations of this type suggests that a
second opportunity for the creation of higher religions might then never
have presented itself. The actual recurrence of the opportunity, and the
flowering, in this second spring, of Christianity, Islam, the MahaySna,
and Hinduism, seem to have been historical consequences of the geneses
of other secondary civilizations that were affiliated with their primary
predecessors through barbarians; and these barbarian foster-parents of
the Syriac, Hellenic, and Indie civilizations would thus appear to have
played a positive, and perhaps indispensable, part in Mankind’s gradual
and laborious advance towards the goal of human endeavours.

Yet, when we have taken due note of this service and estimated it at its
full value, we shall find ourselves still rating it as a modest one on a com¬
parative view. Our conclusion that the role of serving as a cultural
chrysalis is the highest to which any barbarian war-band had ever

1 See VII. vii. 448-9.

* For the sake of brevity, we may perhaps allow ourselves here the perilous licence
of describing a process of social growth in terms of the procreation of organic life—
without forgetting that, in truth, societies are not living organisms (sec III. iii. 219-23
and IV. iv. n-12).

A GENUINE HUMBLE SERVICE 8 S

attained presents a significant contrast to our conclusion 1 that a church,
when it had played the same role, had been digressing from its proper
course on a charitable errand which, at the best, would delay, and, at
the worst, might frustrate, the accomplishment of the church’s own
proper spiritual mission. If this role is a pis-aller for a performer that
plays it so admirably as a church does play the chrysalis-role when it
charitably condescends to it, the very much less effective performance
of the same part by a barbarian war-band cannot be rated as being
anything more than modestly meritorious. And even this slight com¬
pensation for the enormous social havoc that ever}' barbarian war-band
had worked had been paid only by a tiny minority of the war-bands that
had made their devastating cyclone-passages through history.

Even at the transition from the first to the second generation of civiliza¬
tions the barbarians bred by the primary civilizations’ disintegration did
not by any means always play even the moderately creative part of
fostering a secondary civilization’s birth.

The Hyksos barbarians who assembled their forces in Palestine and
the Philistine and Achaean barbarian foster-fathers of the Syriac and
Hellenic civilizations produced, for example, the very opposite of a
creative effect in their impacts on the Egyptiac World. In these Nilotic
escapades, so far from promoting the genesis of a new civilization, the
barbarians performed the most untoward miracle of galvanizing a mori¬
bund civilization into a long protracted life-in-death by goading it into
a fanatically archaistic reaction against their provocative trespasses. The
Hyksos’ successful invasion of the Egyptiac World from an Asian no-
man’s-land* blighted any creative potentialities that might have been
latent in an embryonic Osirian Church by driving the internal proletariat
into the arms of the dominant minority in an union sacrie which achieved
the forcible expulsion of the interloping barbarians at the cost of sterili¬
zing a nascent higher religion; 1 and the Philistines' and Achaeans’unsuc¬
cessful attempt to invade the Egyptiac World some four hundred years
after the eviction of the Hyksos had a comparably maleficent effect on
the course of Egyptiac history. By evoking Ramses Ill’s tour de force of
flinging them bade from the coast of the Delta, ‘the Sea Peoples’ not only
provoked the Egyptiac Society into expending the last reserves of its
already depleted energy; they inflicted on their victim a still graver in¬
jury by reinflaming in him a fanaticism that kept the patient anaemically
alive at a moment when the senile Egyptiac body social was being offered
a second chance of a merciful release from life through the natural decay
of ‘the New Empire’. The inopportune intervention of the Hyksos had
already doubled the term of the Egyptiac Society’s penal servitude in the
prison-house of a universal state by conjuring up ‘the New Empire’ to
repeat the course which ‘the Middle Empire’ had by then already run.
The equally inopportune intervention of ‘the Sea Peoples’ cheated
the prisoner of the belated discharge that he might have expected to

1 In VII. vii. 447-8. t

3 Alternative views on the Hyksos’ provenance are noticed in the note on Chronology
in x. 167-212.
s See I. i. 143-5.

86 HEROIC AGES

receive after the expiry of the second instalment of his life-in-death
sentence. 1

On this showing, we may put down to the barbarians’ account the
difference between the sequels to Egyptiac and Sumeric history. While
the provocativencss of the Hyksos and the turbulence of 'the Sea
Peoples’ deterred a moribund Egyptiac society from duly dying and
thereby leaving the field free for a successor to take its place, the
Sumeric Society was more fortunate in being afflicted on its deathbed
with less stimulating barbarian parasites. The Mitanni barbarians, en
route from the Eurasian Steppe to Syria, seem to have passed the Land
of Shinar by, and the raid in which the Hittite barbarians sacked Babylon
seems to have been as brief as it was devastating. The maggots that
fastened on the carcass of a moribund Sumeric Society were the sluggish
Kassites, whose intrusion did not arouse sufficient antagonism to arrest
the process of nature. Unimpeded by the Kassitc incubus, the trans¬
formation of a moribund Sumeric Society into a nascent Babylonic
Society, through the agency of the Sumeric dominant minority, is
gradually accomplished before our eyes; and this spectacle raises the
question whether the Egyptiac Society might not have succeeded in
similarly making way for a new society of the ‘supra-affiliated’ type
exemplified in the Babylonic Civilization, if only, at the psychologically
favourable moment, when ‘the Middle Empire’ was in extremis, the
Egyptiac World had had the good fortune to be invaded, not, as was its
actual fate, by the perversely stimulating Hyksos, but by those Kassite-
like Libyans who eventually drifted in, after ‘the Sea Peoples’ had come
and gone, so uneventfully that their intrusion failed to produce the usual
bout of militant Egyptiac xenophobia.

If the inauspicious influence of the Hyksos and ‘the Sea Peoples’ on
the course of Egyptiac history has to be set against the merit with which
the barbarians of the first breed are to be credited for their service as
foster-parents of creative secondary civilizations, what verdict are we
to pass on those barbarians of the second breed who were part of the
offspring of the secondary* civilizations in their disintegration ? While the
internal proletariats of the creative secondary civilizations were bringing
the living higher religions to birth, a fresh litter of barbarian war-bands
was being spawned by the external proletariats of secondary civilizations
of both the creative and the uncreative type. If we are right in regarding
the epiphany of the higher religions as being the highest reach of Man¬
kind’s progress so far, we shall have to pass the same verdict on the
second crop of barbarian war-bands that we have passed on the third crop
of secular civilizations. Our verdict on these tertiary civilizations that
broke out of chrysalis-churches has been that, at the best, they were
‘vain repetitions of the heathen’ 2 and, at the worst, pernicious back-
slidings from the ideals and endeavours of the higher religions for which
the creative secondary civilizations had served as chrysalises. 3 In foster¬
ing the birth of the higher religions, those chrysalis-civilizations of the

1 Thi* recurrent galvanization of a moribund Egyptiac Society into renewed bout*
of life-in-death by repeated blows from alien assailants has been noticed in VI. vii.
49 - 50 - * Matt. vi. i See VII. vii. 445.

A GENUINE HUMBLE SERVICE 87

second generation had fulfilled the highest mission of which their species
was capable, and had thereby rendered superfluous any further reproduc¬
tion of their kind. On the same line of reasoning, any further reproduction
of barbarian war-bands must be pronounced to be superfluous after one
litter of war-bands had fulfilled the highest mission open to their kind
by fostering the birth of the chrysalis-civilizations.

This anticipatory judgement by analogy is confirmed by the evidence
of the secondary barbarians’ actual histories; for these barbarians of the
second breed had had no opportunity of performing even the modestly
creative role of their predecessors the barbarian foster-fathers of the
Syriac, Hellenic, and Indie civilizations. The secondary barbarians whose
genesis had been coeval with the epiphany of the living higher religions
had faded out ingloriously in the presence of these great lights. 1 The
dayspring from on liigh

restinxit Stellas, exortus ut aetherius sol. 1

If this is our verdict on the barbarians of the second breed, what are we
to say of the barbarians of a third breed that had been generated by the
disintegration of civilizations of the third generation? At the time of
writing it looked, as we have already observed, 3 as if these latter-day
barbarians were all fated to be swept off the board by the irresistibly
superior military force of a mechanically armed Western Civilization
whose own doom likewise might be heralded by the military triumph of
a technology in which a Modem Western Man had wilfully put his
treasure. In a Westernizing World in the Age of the World Wars the
formidable barbarism—and this was formidable indeed—was an archa-
istic Neobarbarism that was menacing a hard-pressed society, not from
outside, but from within. 4

This Modern Western Neobarbarism has come to our attention in
another context. 5 Our subject in the present Part of this Study has been
the less sinister Barbarism that is a perversion, not of a civilization in
decay, but of a primitive society whose traditional way of life has been
broken up by a decadent civilization’s impact; and the conclusion that
we have reached is that a barbarian war-band spawned by a disintegrat¬
ing civilization’s external proletariat, like a universal state constructed
by a dominant minority, achieves its highest possible destiny in meeting
a fate that we should have accounted a supreme disaster if it had over¬
taken any of the higher religions. Whereas a church puts its mission in
jeopardy by serving as a chrysalis, a war-band, like a universal state,
fulfills its mission by immolating itself as a Phoenix in order that a new
and higher life may spring from its quickening ashes. 6 The barbarian
war-bands that had ‘made history’ were those few that had died in giving
birth to civilizations that had died in their turn to give birth to higher
religions; for in the higher religions God had revealed to Mankind—
through a glass, darkly 7 —a gleam of the light of His countenance. 8

1 On this point, see I. i. 58-62 and 440. n. 2.

* Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book 111 , 1 . 1044.

See V. v.

4 For this rolc^of a universal state, see VI. vii.
’ 1 Cor. xiii. 12.

J In V. v. 332-4.

Ibid.

. 6; xliv. 3; lxxxix. is: *c. 8.

CONTACTS BETWEEN
CIVILIZATIONS IN SPACE

(Encounters between Contemporaries)

A. AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY

(I) THE SELF-TRANSCENDENCE OF
CIVILIZATIONS

J N the three immediately preceding parts of this book' we have followed
up our general study of the problem, nature, and process of the dis¬
integrations of civilizations by making particular studies of the institu¬
tions created by each of the three factions into which the body social of a
disintegrating civilization splits up. We have studied successively the
universal states, the universal churches, and the barbarian war-bands
that arc the characteristic creations of the dominant minorities and the
internal and external proletariats of societies that have convicted them¬
selves of having broken down by falling into schism; and the conclusion
of these three supplementary historical inquiries would have brought us
to the end of our study of History itself if our initial working hypothesis
that civilizations are intelligible fields of study 1 had proved to hold good
for a study of all phases of their histories.

Actually we have found that a civilization can be studied intelligibly
in isolation so long as we are considering its genesis, its growth, or its
breakdown. Indeed, the historical evidence that has presented itself in
our empirical survey of breakdowns has seemed to warrant the conclu¬
sion that the breakdown of a civilization is invariably due to some inward
failure of self-determination and never due to blows delivered by exter¬
nal agencies . 3 After passing, however, from our study of breakdowns to
our study of disintegrations, we have found ourselves unable to under¬
stand this last phase of a broken-down civilization’s history without
extending our mental range of vision, beyond the bounds of the disinte¬
grating civilization itself, to take account of the impact of external
forces . 4 Even if we ignore the tell-tale label that we have affixed to the
barbarians beyond a disintegrating civilization’s limes, and decide to
treat this ‘External Proletariat’ as an integral part of the society on
which it preys—on the ground that the barbarian is not so much an
alien as an alienated proselyte from a primitive way of life 3 —we cannot
deny the alien origin of those elements in an internal proletariat that
have been incorporated through conquests at the expense of an alien
civilization, and cannot overlook the importance of the part that has been

I Parts VI-VIII.

1 The considerations that have led us to work on this hypothesis up to this point have
been set out in I. i. 17-50. > See IV. iv, passim .

4 Sec V. v. 339-40. i See V. v. 294-210 and VIII, passim.

THE SELF-TRANSCENDENCE OF CIVILIZATIONS 89
played by creative inspirations from this alien source in the geneses of
some of those higher religions that the Internal Proletariat has brought
to birth. 1

Thus the history of a single civilization ceases to be intelligible in
isolation when it enters its disintegration-phase; and this discovery that
our initial working hypothesis is not valid for the study of all historical
situations has been confirmed by our subsequent investigations into
universal states, universal churches, and heroic ages; for each of these
investigations has carried us beyond the limits, in both Space and Time,
of the particular civilizations whose declines and falls have generated
the institutions that we have been investigating. Our conclusion has been
that the barbarians bred by the disintegration of one civilization have
made a mark on history in so far as they have succeeded in fostering the
birth of another civilization which eventually, after breaking down and
disintegrating in its turn, has ministered to the rise of one of the higher
religions by providing a framework for it in the shape of a universal
state. Universal states, like barbarian war-bands, have made their mark
by unintentionally and unconsciously working, not for themselves, but
for other beneficiaries; and these beneficiaries have all been alien in the
sense of being foreign to the particular civilization in the history of
whose disintegration the particular universal state has been an episode.
The higher religions have proved to be new societies of a different
species from the civilizations under the aegis of whose universal states
they have made their epiphanies; and, in so far as universal states have
not made their mark by performing services for universal churches,
they have made it by performing them for barbarians or for alien
civilizations.

These alien civilizations, like the barbarians beyond the pale, have
been certified as being alien by the simple and obvious geographical fact
that their places of origin have lain outside the frontiers of the universal
state on whose domain they have eventually trespassed and whose in¬
stallations and institutions they have taken over. Yet some—and these
not the least notable—of the higher religions that have made their
epiphany inside those frontiers have been no less alien on that account,
for their adherents have felt themselves, and been felt by their pagan
neighbours, to be ‘in but not of’ the disintegrating society within whose
body social, in its universal state, the religion has made its first appear¬
ance; and, as we have just reminded ourselves, this aloofness, where it
has displayed itself, has been a psychological expression of the historical
fact that the source of the religion’s creative inspiration has been alien
to the tradition of the society within whose universal state the new
religion has first presented itself to Mankind. The Roman Empire
provided an Hellenic-made cradle for a Syriac-inspired Christianity,
while the Kushan barbarian successor-state of the Bactrian Greek
Empire provided a likewise Hellenic-made cradle for an Indic-inspired
Mahayana; and, though it is true, on the other hand, that, unlike
Christianity and the Mahayana, Islam and Hinduism each drew its
inspiration from a civilization that provided it with its political cradle as
» See I. i. 57 and V. v. 359-63.

90 AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY
well, it is also true that, in the geneses of these two higher religions like¬
wise, there had been a previous chapter in which more than one civiliza¬
tion had been concerned. A Syriac-inspired Islam and its Syriac-made
cradle the Caliphate were Syriac reactions on the religious and on the
political plane to a foregoing intrusion of Hellenism on the Syriac
World; and a subsequent intrusion of Hellenism on the Indie World had
similarly evoked both an Indic-inspired Hinduism and its Indic-made
cradle the Guptan Empire. It thus appears that the genesis of each of
the higher religions that were still alive in the twentieth century of the
Christian Era becomes intelligible only when we expand our field of
study from the ambit of a single civilization to embrace encounters
between two civilizations or more. 1

(II) BIRTHPLACES OF RELIGIONS IN
MEETINGPLACES OF CIVILIZATIONS

The importance of the part played in the geneses of higher religions by
encounters between different civilizations is indicated by one of the
commonplaces of historical geography which is as remarkable as it is
familiar. When we mark down the birthplaces of the higher religions
on a map, we find them clustering in and round two relatively small
patches 1 of the total land-surface of the Old World—on the one hand the
Oxus-Jaxartes Basin and on the other hand Syria (in the broad sense in
which this term had been used, in the vocabulary of physical geography,
to cover an area bounded by the North Arabian Steppe, the Mediter¬
ranean Sea, and the southern escarpments of the Anatolian and Armenian
plateaux). 3 The Oxus-Jaxartes Basin was the birthplace of the Mah3y5na
in the form in which this religion spread from there over the Far
Eastern World; and, before that, it had been the birthplace of Zoroas¬
trianism—as appeared to be generally agreed among Modern Western
scholars, however widely they might differ in their dating of the epiphany
of the Prophet Zarathustra. In Syria, Christianity acquired at Antioch
the form in which it spread from there over the Hellenic World as a
new religion, after having made its first appearance, as a variety of
Pharisaic Judaism, in Galilee. Judaism itself and the sister religion of the
Samaritans arose in Southern Syria, in the hill country between the
Mediterranean coastal plain and the Jordan canon. The Monothclcte
Christianity of the Maronites and the Hakim-worshipping Shi'ism of

1 This conclusion has been anticipated in V. v. 372-6. The same point is made in a
letter, dated the 16th December, 1950, and published in The A'etc York Timet of the
20th December, 1950, from Professor Th. H. von Laue of Swarthmorc College, Penn¬
sylvania, in which this Western historian contends that the current competition between
rival cultures and ideologies in a coalescing Oikoumcni cannot be made intelligible to
students of History in the United States if their field of study is confined to the history
of their own Western Civilization. a See xi, maps 21 a and b.

1 It will be seen that Syria, in this physical sense of the term, is approximately con¬
terminous with the combined area of four successor-states of the Ottoman Empire—
Syria, Transjordan, the Lebanon, and Palestine—that were carved out in the peace-
settlement following the General War of a.d. 1914-18. After the close of the General
War of A.D. 1939-45, Palestine was partitioned de facto between a new Jewish state
which took the name ‘Israel', a Transjordan which re-named itself 'Jordan', and an
Egypt which made a lodgment in the south-west comer of the partitioned territory.

BIRTHPLACES OF RELIGIONS 91

the Druses both came to birth in Central Syria—the Druse Church in the
fastnesses of Mount Hermon and the Maronite Church in those of the
Lebanon.

This geographical concentration of the birthplaces of higher religions
becomes still more conspicuous when we extend our horizon to take in

Z 'ons adjacent to the two core-areas. Both the Nestorian and the
nophysite variety of the Syriac version of a Hellenized Christianity
took shape in and round Urfa-Edessa, in the Mesopotamian prolonga¬
tion of Syria towards the East between the North Arabian Steppe and
Mount Masius, while the HijazI prolongation of Syria towards the
South, along the highlands between the Red Sea coastal plain and the
steppes of the Najd, saw the birth, at Mecca and Medina, of a Christian
heresy which became the new religion of Islam. The Shi'i heretical form
of Islam, like the Manichaean heretical form of Zoroastrianism,' was
born on the eastern shore of the North Arabian Steppe, in a borderland
between ‘the Desert’ and ‘the Sown’ in which the radiation of religious
influences from Syria and the Hij2z through the conductive medium of
the Steppe impinged upon the Euphratean marches of Tr5q. When we
similarly extend the radius of our observation of tire Oxus-Jaxartcs Basin,
we locate the birthplace of the MahaySna, in its first appearance as a
variation on the philosophy of Primitive Buddhism, in the adjacent
Basin of the Indus; the birthplace of this Primitive Buddhism in the
Middle Ganges Basin, and the birthplace of a post-Buddhaic Hinduism
in the same quarter of the Indian Sub-Continent.

What is the explanation of these remarkable facts ? When wc look into
the characteristics of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin and Syria and compare
them with one another, we perceive a feature, prominent in both, which
accounts for their historic role in the geneses of higher religions and
makes it clear that the likeness between their histories had been the out¬
come, not of some freakish play of Chance, but of an underlying likeness
between their geographical locations.

This prominent common feature of Syria and the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin
is the capacity, with which each of them had been endowed by Nature,
for serving as a ‘roundabout’ where traffic coming in from any point of
the compass could be switched to any other point of the compass in
any number of alternative combinations and permutations . 2 On the
Syrian ‘roundabout’, routes converged from the Nile Basin, from the
Mediterranean, from Anatolia with its South-East European continental
hinterland, from the Tigris-Euphrates Basin, and from an Arabian Steppe
which, in the purview of human geography, may be regarded as ‘a water¬
less sea’ in virtue of its sea-like cultural conductivity . 3 On the Central
Asian ‘roundabout’, similarly, routes converged from the Tigris-
Euphrates Basin via the Iranian Plateau, from India through the passes
over the Hindu Kush, from the Far East via the Tarim Basin, and
from an adjacent Eurasian Steppe that had taken the place, and inherited

< See V. v. 575-80.

1 This function of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin in the human geography of the Old World
has been noticed in V. v. 131-40.

3 This analogy between the Steppe and the Sea has been noticed in I. i. 64; III.
iii. 7-8, 278, n. i, 391-4, and 399.

92 AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY

the conductivity, of a now desiccated ‘Second Mediterranean’ whose
former presence there was attested by its fragmentary survival in the
Caspian, the Sea of Aral, and Lake Balkash.

The role for which Nature had thus designed these two potential
traffic-centres had actually, as we know, been played by each of them
again and again during the five or six thousand years that had passed
since the emergence of the earliest civilizations. Syria had been the scene
of encounters between the Sumeric and Egyptiac civilizations before the
dissolution of the Sumeric Civilization in the seventeenth century B.C.;
between the Egyptiac, abortive First Syriac, Hittite, and Minoan
civilizations from the sixteenth to the twelfth century b.c.; between
the Syriac, Babylonic, Egyptiac, and Hellenic civilizations and a fossil
remnant of the Hittite Civilization from the twelfth century B.c. to the
seventh century of the Christian Era; between the Syriac, Orthodox
Christian, and Western Christian civilizations from the seventh to the
thirteenth century of the Christian Era; and between the Arabic,
Iranic, and Western since the thirteenth century, while the Nomadic
Civilization of the Afrasian and Eurasian steppes has been an additional
party to all these encounters. 1 The corresponding record of Central
Asia’s geographical service as a cultural meeting-point would also be
impressive if Syria’s record were not so extraordinary. The Oxus-
Jaxartes Basin had been the scene of encounters between the Syriac and
Indie civilizations from the sixth century b.c. to the eighth century of
the Christian Era; between the Syriac, Indie, Hellenic, and Sinic from
the fourth century b.c. to the fifth century of the Christian Era; and
between the Syriac Civilization, the main body of the Far Eastern
Civilization, and the Tantric Mahayanian Buddhist fossil of a by-then-
cxtinct Indie Civilization from the fifth century of the Christian Era to
the thirteenth.

These series of encounters between divers civilizations on Syrian and
on Central Asian ground, which had borne spiritual fruit in the births
of higher religions, had been registered on the political plane in the
repeated inclusion of each of these two peculiarly ‘numiniferous’ regions
in universal states, or in other empires performing similar social func¬
tions, that had been thrown up by these colliding civilizations in the
course of their histories.

Syria appears to have been included alternately in the Sumeric ‘Empire
of the Four Quarters’ and in the Egyptiac ‘Middle Empire’ from the
twenty-first to the seventeenth century b.c.; in the seventeenth century
it formed part of a Hyksos successor-state of ‘the Empire of the Four
Quarters’ which had flooded over the derelict domain of ‘the Middle
Empire’ and had established its headquarters in the Nile Delta; from
the sixteenth to the fourteenth century B.c. it was included in ‘the New
Empire’ of Egypt; in the thirteenth century b.c. it was partitioned
between this ‘New Empire’ of Egypt and the Hittite Power; in the
eighth and seventh centuries b.c. it was incorporated progressively into
the Assyrian Empire, and in the sixth century it was annexed in its

1 These encounters between a number of civilizations on Syrian ground have been
noticed, in passing, in V. v. 117-18 and 488.

BIRTHPLACES OF RELIGIONS 93

entirety (including the southern principalities of Judah, Edom, and
Moab, which had just escaped failing under the Assyrian yoke) to a
Neo-Babylonian Empire which, in the course of the same century, was
swallowed up, entire, in the vaster empire of the Achaemenidae. From
the fourth to the second century b . c . Syria was a bone of contention
between the Achaemcnids’ Seleucid and Ptolemaic successor-states;
but in the last century b . c . it was politically reunited, without being
liberated from alien rule, through being annexed to the Roman Empire,
and thereafter it continued to form part of the Roman imperial body
politic for seven hundred years—till, in the seventh century of the
Christian Era, its conquest from the Roman Empire by the Primitive
Muslim Arabs resulted in its inclusion, without any interval of inde¬
pendence, in a Caliphate which was a revival of the Achaemenian
Empire. Upon the breakdown of the 'Abbasid imperial regime in the
tenth century of the Christian Era, Syria became once more a bone of
contention between successor-states. The harpies in this chapter of
Syrian history were the Katama Berbers (masquerading as a ‘Fatimid’
Caliphate), the East Roman Empire, the Western Christian Crusaders,
and an Ayyubid Power whose Cairene Mamluk successors succeeded,
before the close of the thirteenth century, in reuniting the whole of
Syria under their rule—to remain under it throughout the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, until, in the sixteenth century, the Cairene
Mamluks’ dominions were swallowed up, entire, in the vaster empire
of the 'Osmanlis. The Ottoman regime in Syria lasted for four hundred
years ( a . d . 1516-1918) —till the break-up of the Ottoman Empire’s
Asiatic dominions as a result of the General War of a . d . 1914-18.

This summary recapitulation of Syria’s political history brings out the
fact that, over a span of four thousand years—from the twenty-first
century b . c . to the twentieth century of the Christian Era—the usual
political fate of Syria had been to find herself included in the dominions
of some universal state. Even when one of these oecumenical empires
embracing Syria had broken up, Syria’s destiny, as often as not, had
been immediately to be annexed entire to some other empire of the kind
—as she was taken over from the Neo-Babylonian Empire by the
Achaemenian Empire, from the Roman Empire by the Arab Caliphate,
and from the Egyptian Mamluk Power by the Ottoman Empire. Even
at times when Syria had not been included as a whole within the frontiers
of some single empire, her most frequent alternative fate had been to be
partitioned between two empires embracing other regions besides their
portions of Syrian territory. In the course of the last four thousand
years, reckoning back from the twentieth century of the Christian Era,
Syria had been partitioned in this way between an Egyptiac ‘Middle
Empire’ and a Sumeric ‘Empire of the Four Quarters’; between an
Egyptiac ‘New Empire’ and a Hittite Power with its political centre of
gravity in East Central Anatolia; between an African Ptolemaic and an
Asiatic Seleucid successor-state of the Achaemenian Empire; and be¬
tween an African ‘Fatimid’ Caliphate and an Anatolian East Roman
Empire.

The intervals during which Syria had been under the sovereignty of

94 AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY

local Syrian states had been few and far between; indeed, there were no
more than four historical instances of this political dispensation: during
an interregnum between the evaporation of ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt
in the twelfth century b.c. and the final onset of Assyria in the eighth
century; 1 during the shorter period of relief from external pressure
between the collapse of the Seleucid Power in the second century' B.c. and
the Romans’ entry into the Seleucids’ heritage in the last century B.c. ; 2
during the bout of anarchy which intervened between the collapse of
the ‘Fatimid’ and East Roman Powers in the eleventh century of the
Christian Era and the establishment of the Cairene Mamluk Power in the
thirteenth century; and since the liquidation of the Ottoman Empire in
South-West Asia in and after the General War of a.d. 1914-18. During
each of these exceptional periods, Syria had been in the hands of a
number of parochial sovereign states; yet, though these local principali¬
ties had been governed from Syrian capitals, their rulers had, for the
most part, been recent arrivals from abroad—Philistines, Greeks,
Crusaders, or Zionists from the European shores of the Mediterranean;
Hebrews or Arabs from the North Arabian Steppe; and Kurds from the
Zagros—and, under the rule of these intrusive muluk-at-tau&’if the
political and cultural atmosphere in Syria had still been redolent of an
oecumenical regime that had been the Syrians’ normal experience in
most of the chapters in their history.

The degree to which Syria’s political history had been dominated by
her geographical location at a meeting-point of natural thoroughfares
was the more impressive, considering that Syria’s physical structure was
inimical to the imperialism to which Syria had usually been subject,
while it was favourable to the Kleinstaaterei in which she had so seldom
been free to indulge. Syria was not only bounded by ‘natural frontiers’
that demarcated her vis-a-vis the regions round about; she was also
articulated internally, like Greece, into a multitude of small physically
self-contained ‘pockets’ and ‘perches’, and a number of the ‘perches’—
for instance, the Jabal 'Amil, the Lebanon, the Jabal Ansarlyah, the
Jabal HawrSn and Mount Gerizim—had served as fastnesses for
fossilized politico-religious communities: 3 Imam! Shi'Is, Maronite
Monotheletcs, 'All-worshipping Nusayris, Hakim-worshipping Druses,
and dissidentlyYahweh-worshipping Samaritans. If Syria’s geographical
location had insulated her from the outer world, as Nature had insulated
New Guinea, instead of exposing her, like the Oxus-Jaxartcs Basin, to
the play of external influences and pressures from all quarters of the
compass, her physiography, with its strongly pronounced internal
articulation within clearly defined ‘natural frontiers’, would have im¬
posed on her, as her normal regime, a political decentralization which the
political effects of her location had precluded on all but four occasions
in her history during the last four thousand years.

This Syrian pattern of political history recurs in the Oxus-Jaxartes
Basin. Whether it was the Median or the Persian successor-state of the

1 See IV. iv. 473 , n. 3.

1 Tacitus’s remark on this point has been quoted in V. v. 390, n. 3.

1 Sec I. i. 362; II. ii. 55-57; and V. v. 1x8 and 125, n. 1.

BIRTHPLACES OF RELIGIONS 95

Assyrian Empire that salvaged this borderland from a Scythian Nomad
domination in the sixth century b.c., 1 the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin comes
into the full light of history as part of the oecumenical empire of the
Achaemenidae, 1 and it failed in an attempt to assert its independence
when the Achaemenian regime was overthrown by Alexander the Great.
A prowess acquired in holding the north-east frontier of the Syriac
World against the Eurasian Nomads did not avail the Bactrian and
Sogdian border barons in their gallant struggle against the Macedonian
invader. After two campaigns they found themselves compelled to
capitulate on terms; 3 and, after Alexander’s death, their country passed
into the hands of the Achacmenids’ Seleucid successors. The political
independence for which the native Iranian population had fought in
330-328 b.c. was attained by the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin only some ninety
years later, and, even then, it was not won by native hands and was not
long-lived.

In the third quarter of the third century B.c. the Greek garrisons in
the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin—finding themselves cut off from the main
body of the Seleucid Empire by the intrusion of the Nomad Parni from
the Transcaspian Steppe into Parthia, on the north-eastern edge of the
Iranian Plateau astride the Great North-East Road from Babylonia*—
erected a Seleucid province into an independent local Greek principality
of their own; 3 but, after two generations, these local Greek princes of
Bactria deliberately remerged the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin in a vaster body
politic by crossing the Hindu Kush circa 183 B.c. and annexing the
north-western territories of the Mauryan Empire in India; 6 and, though
the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin became a separate political entity again for a
season when, less than half a century after the Bactrian Greeks’ conquest
of North-Western India, their home territory on the north-west side of
the Hindu Kush was overrun by Saka and Kushan Nomad invaders, 7
the Kushans eventually followed the example of their Greek predecessors
by crossing the Hindu Kush in their turn and annexing North-Western
India to their Central Asian dominions in the course of the first century
of the Christian Era. 8 This political reunion of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin
with the Indus and Ganges basins under a Kushan Raj was followed up,
during the reign of the Kushan empire-builder Kanishka (regnabat circa
a.d. 78-123), by the annexation of the Tarim Basin 9 —an eastward pro¬
longation of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin which had been under the Sinic
rule of the Prior Han Dynasty from 101 B.c. to a.d. 16, and had been
reconquered by the Posterior Han between a.d. 73 and a.d. io2. 10 During
the second century of the Christian Era the Tarim Basin seems to have
been a debatable territory between the Kushan and the Posterior Han
Power. 11

As for the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin itself, it relapsed into local indepen-

* Sec II. ii. 138. * See II. ii. 139.

* See II. ii. 139-40. 4 For this road, see VI. vii. 200.

> See II. ii. 143 and 371. The transition from province to principality seems to have
been a gradual one (see Tam, W. W.: The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge
1938. University Press), pp. 72-74). 6 See I. i. 86 and II. ii. 371-a.

7 See II. ii. i4r, n. 2, and 372, and V. v. 133, n. 1.

96 'an expansion of the field of study

dcncc after the decay of the Kushan Power in the third century of the
Christian Era; but, after its Kushan masters had been submerged, at the
turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, by an Ephthalite Ilun wave of
Eurasian Nomad invaders, and the Ephthalites had succumbed, in the
sixth century, to a following wave of Turks, 1 the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin
was incorporated, once again, into a universal state through its annexa¬
tion, in the eighth century, to the Arab Caliphate; 2 and thereafter the
set pattern of its political history continued to repeat itself. After passing
through the hands of the SSmanid, Saljuq, Qara Qitay, and Kw 5 rizrni
successors of the 'Abbasids, the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin was engulfed m the
Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era; 3 and,
after the liberator, Timur Lenk, had been betrayed by a demonic
militarism into a dispersal of his energies which last him his chance of
making Transoxania the headquarters of a universal state embracing all
the shores of the Eurasian Steppe, 4 the opportunity which Timur had
failed to seize in the fourteenth century for Transoxania was successfully
seized in the nineteenth century by a Muscovite Power which had pro¬
vided a disintegrating Russian offshoot of Orthodox Christendom with
its universal state.

At the time of writing, the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin formed part of the
dominions of the Russian Empire’s successor the U.S.S.R., and the links
of steel with which Soviet Central Asia had been bound to the Soviet
territories on the opposite shores of the Eurasian Steppe by the con¬
struction of the Transcaspian, Orenburg-Tashkend, and ‘Turk-Sib’
railways 5 were constantly being reinforced through a progressive in¬
dustrialization of the Central Asian Soviet Republics on a plan designed
to integrate them, economically as well as politically, with the rest of
the Soviet Union.

It will be seen that, since the sixth century b.c., the Oxus-Jaxartes
Basin had been included successively in four full-blown universal states
—the Achaemenian Empire, the Arab Caliphate, the Mongol Empire,
and the Russian Empire—and in three other empires—the Selcucid, the
Bactrian Greek, and the Kushan—which had performed the social and
cultural functions of universal states, even if they did not qualify techni¬
cally for being given the title. The adjoining Tarim Basin, which pro¬
longed the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin towards the east, had been included
successively in three universal states—the Han Empire, the Mongol
Empire, and the Manchu Empire—as well as in the Kushan dominions.
Syria had been included in no less than eight universal states—the
Sumeric ‘Empire of the Four Quarters’, ‘the Middle Empire’ and ‘the
New Empire’ of Egypt, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the Achaemenian
Empire, the Roman Empire, the Arab Caliphate, and the Ottoman
Empire—without counting in the Hyksos, Hittite, Assyrian, Seleucid,
‘Fatimid’, East Roman, and Mamluk episodes in Syrian political history.
This political record was so much evidence of encounters between a

> See II. ii. 141, n. 2.

2 See II. ii. 141 and 375-84- 1 See II. ii. 142.

* See II. ii. 146-S and IV. iv. 491-501. .

i The first two of these three railways had been built before the Revolution of a.d.
, 9 , 7 -

BIRTHPLACES OF RELIGIONS 97

number of different civilizations on Syrian and Central Asian ground;
and this exceptionally active intercourse between civilizations in these
two areas explains the extraordinary concentration, within their limits,
of birthplaces of higher religions.

(Ill) A CLASSIFICATION OF TYPES OF
CONTACT BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS

On the strength of this testimony from the histories of Syria and the
Oxus-Jaxartes Basin we may venture to propound a ‘law’ to the effect
that, for a study of higher religions, the minimum intelligible field must
be larger than the domain of any single civilization, since it must be a
field in which two or more civilizations have encountered one another.
Our next step will be to take a wider survey of those encounters that, in
certain historic instances, have had the effect of bringing higher religions
to birth; but, before embarking on this survey, we must define more
closely the type of encounter with which we are immediately concerned.

The encounters here in question are contacts in the Space-dimension
between civilizations which, ex hypothesi, must be contemporaries in
order to be able to meet one another face to face at some particular
place on the Earth’s surface; but this contact in the Space-dimension
between contemporaries is not the only form of contact between different
civilizations that has come to our notice in this Study. We have also come
across contacts in the medium, not of Space, but of Time.

One kind of contact between civilizations in the Time-dimension is
the relation between two civilizations of different generations which we
have labelled ‘Apparentation-and-Affiliation’. 1 In this relation the two
parties overlap with one another in the Time-dimension, as contem¬
porary civilizations overlap with one another in the Space-dimension
when they meet on common geographical ground. After the body social
of a disintegrating civilization has split up into a dominant minority and
a proletariat, the embryo of a new civilization may be germinating in the
womb of the Internal Proletariat while the Dominant Minority is still
fighting a stubborn losing battle to keep the old civilization alive; and
in this way two civilizations that are not of the same generation will
overlap in Time—as contemporary civilizations with mutually exclusive
geographical habitats will overlap in Space when part of the domain of
one of them is annexed, whether by conquest or by peaceful penetration,
to the domain of another.

The relation of Apparentation-and-Affiliation is by definition, as will
be evident, a relation in the Time-dimension which can only arise
when each of the parties is in one particular phase of its history: the
phase of disintegration in the apparented society’s case and, in the
affiliated society’s, the phase of pre-natal gestation. In other words, this
is a relation between two civilizations which, at the time when they are
establishing it, are as remote from one another in terms of their respec¬
tive current stages of existence as any two civilizations can ever be.

1 See I. i. 44.

B 2SS8.vm

93 AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY

There is, however, another kind of contact in the Time-dimension that
an affiliated civilization can make, in after life, with a by now extinct
civilization to which the living civilization is already related in virtue of
an original contact made when the still living civilization was in embryo
and the now dead civilization was in extremis. This original contact in the
form of Apparcntation-and-Affiliation will have started the younger
civilization in life with a stock of practices and ideas derived from the
older civilization’s cultural heritage; and, on the strength of the memories
of the older civilization which have thus become embedded in the
younger civilization’s own cultural tradition, the younger civilization
can evoke its elder’s ghost after the younger civilization has come to
birth and the elder has passed out of existence.

Such an encounter between a living civilization and the ghost of a dead
predecessor is manifestly different in kind from the previous relation
between the same living civilization when it was in the embryo stage
and the same predecessor when it was still alive, though moribund. The
difference may be compared with that between an adult Hamlet’s en¬
counter with his father’s ghost and an infant Hamlet’s relation with the
same father in the flesh. The relation between the child and his living
father has more life in it than the relation between the grown man and
his dead father’s apparition; for in the earlier relation both parties are
alive and there is therefore a reciprocal action of each on the other,
whereas, in the encounter between man and ghost, the man alone is
capable of being affected by the experience, since the apparition with
which an adult Hamlet holds converse is not in truth another living
personality, but is a ‘projection’ or ‘objectivization’ of feelings and
ideas, latent in Hamlet's own psyche, that have been recalled by his
own memory and clothed with life by his own imagination. Hamlet
conversing with the ghost is like a ventriloquist in colloquy with his
lay figure; a single party is actually playing simultaneously both the
parts in what purports to be a dialogue between two actors. Yet, though
in this sense the ‘renaissance’ of an extinct culture in the life of a living
civilization is no more than the simulation of a genuine encounter
between one living civilization and another, there is also a sense in
which it can be a more intimate communion than the relation of
Apparentation-and-Affiliation between one civilization that is already
senile, though still alive, and another that, though already alive, is still
in embryo.

In the relation of Apparentation-and-Affiliation the extent of the
difference in age between the two living parties severely limits their
capacity for appreciating one another’s point of view and profiting by
one another’s experience. There are many treasures of experience in a
moribund civilization’s storehouse which an embryonic civilization finds
valueless, because it finds them incomprehensible; but, if the prestige
of the elder civilization in the younger civilization’s eyes avails to induce
the younger to take up into its own tradition this apparently useless
lumber from its elder’s cultural heritage, this act of blind faith may
eventually earn its reward. ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I
understood as a child, I thought as a child; but, when I became a man,

TYPES OF CONTACT OF CIVILIZATIONS 99

I put away childish things.’ 1 When the younger civilization has come of
age in its turn, it will have become capable of understanding, by analogy
from adult experience of its own, the adult experience of its now dead
predecessor which was incomprehensible to it in a previous chapter of
its history in which the elder civilization was still alive, but the younger
was not yet grown to man’s estate. Though, no doubt, an experience of
life can be imparted more vividly to a receptive recipient through living
contact in the flesh with the subject of that experience than through a
recollection derived at second hand from the subject’s literary remains
at a date when their author is dead, the receptivity of the recipient is a
condition sine qua non for the success of any experiment in the trans¬
mission of cultural treasure; and a recipient who has grown to be
receptive will be capable of deriving more cultural benefit from a
‘renaissance’ of the culture of a predecessor who is long since dead than
the same recipient will have found himself able to derive, in his own
uncomprehending infancy, from his elder when he was still present in
the flesh. 2

A point thus put in general terms is perhaps easier to apprehend in a
concrete illustration taken from the history of the Western Civilization’s
relations with Hellenism. In Western cultural history the generations
that had understood Hellenism best, and had made the most of it for the
benefit of their own Western Society, had not been those that had been
contemporary with Hellenism in the last days of its life; they had been
the later generations that had cast their eyes back to a long since dead
Hellenic World across a span of time which the West had turned to
account for accumulating an experience of its own, akin to the stored-up
experience of its Hellenic predecessor. The possession of this adult
yardstick had enabled an Erasmus to appreciate and appropriate the
treasures of a Classical Greek and Latin literature that had been virtually
a closed book to a Gregory of Tours—though the Western Christian
chronicler had been the contemporary of a Latin poet Venantius
Fortunatus who had been linked by a continuous chain of poetic tradition
with the Virgilian Age. In the strength of the same ripe Western experi¬
ence a Gibbon was able to savour the Hellenic culture of the Antoninc
Age with a surer taste and a keener zest than a Gregory the Great; 3
though, in the generation in which this Pope had been nursing an infant
Western Civilization through its first convulsions, 4 the City of Rome
had still been living under the sovereignty of the same Roman Imperial
Government that had once been directed by the enlightened mind of a

« 1 Cor. xiii. it. 1 Sec further X. ix. 124-30.

* 'Je nc d^teste pa* de glnlraliscr la notion de moderne ct dc donner cc nom &
certain mode d’exiatencc, au lieu d’en fairc un pur synonyme dc conlemporain. 11 y a
dans l'histoirc dcs moments ct dc* lieux oil nous pourrion* nous introduce, now
modernts, sans troublcr cxcessivement l’harmonie de ces tcmps- 14 , et sans y paraitre
dcs objets infiniment curieux, inhniment visibles, dcs itres choquants, dissonants,
inassimilables. Oil notre entree ferait le moins dc sensation, lii nous jommes presque
chez nous. I! est ciair que !a Rome de Trajan et que rAlexandrie dcs Ptolom^cs nous
absorberaient plus facilcment que bien dcs localitds moins rcculdcs dans le temps, mais
plus gplcialisces dans un seul type de maurs et entiirement consacrees a une aeule rice,
a une scule culture et a un acul systime de vie’ (Valiry, Paul: ‘La Criac dc rEsorit’, in
Variiti (Paris 1924, Gallimard, Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Franjaise), pp. 18-19).

« See III. iii. 267-9.

ioo AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY
Hadrian, a Pius, and a Marcus. For the same reason the fathers of the
American and French revolutions were able to draw on political experi¬
ences of Republican Rome, of the Lycian and Achaean confederacies,
and of Pcriclcan Athens, which had remained beyond the political
horizon of a Dante or a Rienzi. 1

The children of a growing Western Civilization had, in fact, met with
the experience that awaits travellers setting out south-westwards from
the spot where Caesarea Mazaca nestles at the foot of Mount Argaeus.
In the early stages of their journey the wayfarers are still too close to the
foothills, and too low down in the plain, to be able to see the mighty
peak; and, in their eyes at this stage, the soaring volcano is fallaciously
represented by the last and lowest waves of its petrified lava-flow. It is
not till the caravan has made its passage of the salt-flats and has begun
to climb the flank of the South Cappadocian Plateau that Argaeus begins
to reveal his stature, in its majesty, to the travellers’ view. From that
vantage point they see him, across the intervening hollows, in better

1 This widening of a Western mental horizon in one direction had, of course, to be
paid for by its contraction in another. The Early Modem Western Humanists' aesthetic
appreciation of the Hellenic literature of the Peridean Age made them aliens in the
intellectual realm of the Late Medieval Western Schoolmen in which their fathers had
been freemen bom. The Late Modem Western rationalist orientation of Gibbon’s and
Bury’s intellects inhibited their imaginations from entering into the feelings of souls
bom into a post-Hellenic interregnum and an Early Medieval Western ‘Dark Age’
which these eminent Late Modem Western historians had, perhaps perversely, made it
their life-work to Study and interpret.

This eclipse of insight by rationalism is manifest in Bury’s dogmatic rejection of a
contemporary account of the way in which the Emperor Hcraclius spent his time on
the eve of a bold and perilous enterprise that was going to decide, not merely the
Emperor’s fate, but the fates of the Empire and the Church as well.

‘The winter before his departure fon his daring counter-offensive campaign of a.d.
622] was spent by Hcraclius in retirement. He was probably engaged in studying strategy
and geography and planning his first campaign. Those who look upon him as an inspired
enthusiast would like to see in this retirement the imperative need of communion with his
own soul and with God; they suppose that he was like John the Baptist, or that, like Jesus,
he retired to a mountain to pray. To support this idea they can appeal to George of
Pisidia, who, speaking of this retreat, says that the Emperor ‘‘imitated Elias of old",
and uses many other expressions which may be interpreted in a similar manner. It is
probable that Hcraclius was fain to possess his soul in silence for a few months; but it
is hazardous to press the theological word-painting of a poetical ecclesiastic into the
service of the theory that Heraclius was a semi-prophetic enthusiast with a naturally
weak will. When George of Pisidia mentions in another place ( Hetacliad , Book II, II.
120 and 136 seaq.) that the Emperor studied treatises on tactics and rehearsed plans of
battle, we feel that we are on surer ground. The Strategikon of [the Emperor] Maurice,
doubtless, was constantly in his hands’ (Bury, I. B.: A History 0/ the Later Roman
Empire (London 1889, Macmillan), 2 vols., vol. ii, pp. 224-j).

In this passage the Late Modem historian-rationalist lays himself open to the censure
of a post-Modem historian-philosopher.

'Historical inquiry reveals to the historian the powers of his own mind. Since all he
can know historically is thoughts that he can re-think for himself, the fact of his coming
to know them shows him that his mind is able (or, by the very effort of studying them,
has become able) to think in these ways. And conversely, whenever he finds certain
historical matters unintelligible, he has discovered a limitation of his own mind; he has
discovered that there arc certain ways in which he is not, or no longer, or not yet, able
to think. Certain historians, sometimes whole generations of historians, find in certain
periods of history nothing intelligible, and call them 'dark ages’; but such phrases tell
us nothing about those ages themselves, though they tell us a great deal about the per¬
sons who use them, namely that they arc unable to re-think the thoughts which were
fundamental to their life, it has been said that die Weltgeschichle ist das Weltgerieht;
and it is true, but in a sense not always recognized. It is the historian himself who stands
at the bar of judgement, and there reveals his own mind in its strength and weakness,
its virtues and its vices’ (Collingwood, R. G.: The Idea of History (Oxford 1946, Claren¬
don Press), pp. 218-19).

TYPES OF CONTACT OF CIVILIZATIONS :ox
perspective than was possible for them at the earlier stage in their
journey when their road was actually traversing the mountains’ spurs
and when the peak was therefore towering sheer above them—so close
that it was still invisible.

There is thus a clear distinction to be drawn between the relation of
‘Apparentation-and-Affiliation’ and another form of contact in the
Time-dimension between an adult living civilization and a dead
civilization whose cultural legacy the living civilization appropriates for
its own use and profit by the creative act of recollection that is known as
a ‘renaissance’. The phenomenon of ‘Apparentation-and-Affiliation’ has
been sufficiently examined already in our study of the disintegrations of
civilizations and of the resulting universal states, universal churches,
and heroic ages. 1 The phenomenon of a ‘renaissance’, in which an
affiliated civilization evokes its predecessor’s ‘ghost’, requires further
consideration, as it has been noticed here only incidentally so far.
Accordingly our study, in the present Part, of encounters between con¬
temporaries will be followed in the next Part by a study of contacts in
the Time-dimension in the particular form of 'renaissances’.

Before we proceed with our present inquiry into encounters between
contemporaries in the Space-dimension, we have, however, still to
elucidate one point and to take note of another.

The point to be elucidated is the relation of Archaism—one of the
symptoms of the malady of schism in the Soul which we have examined
in a previous Part of this Study 1 —to Apparentation-and-Affiliation on
the one hand and to renaissances on the other. In terms of renaissances,
Archaism might perhaps be described as being a kind of renaissance in
which the commerce between the living and the dead is transacted, not
between two different civilizations representing two different genera¬
tions of their species of society, but between two different phases in the
history of one and the same civilization. 3 While Archaism thus has in
common with renaissances the feature of being the evocation of a ghost,
it differs from renaissances and resembles Apparentation-and-Affiliation
in being a relation between parties whose respective experiences and
outlooks are, not similar, but diverse.

The other point that we have to consider before proceeding with the
inquiry that is the subject of the present Part of this Study is a com¬
pound form of contact in which an encounter between two contempor¬
aries that arc, both of them, affiliated to the same dead predecessor
leads to a renaissance, in the life of one of these two living civilizations,
of an element in the dead civilization’s cultural legacy which has been
preserved ‘in cold storage’ in the tradition of the other living civilization
and has been imparted by this ‘carrier’ to her contemporary' and sister

* See V-VIII of the present Study, patrim. 1 In V. vi. 49-97.

1 In this aspect in which it appears to be a kind of renaissance. Archaism is the
counterpart, in the field of relations in the Time-dimension, of those encounters between
a 'fossil and the body social that has precipitated it, or between a creative minority
and an uncreative rank-and-file, which, in the field of relations in the Space-dimension,
may be described as being a kind of encounter between contemporaries in which the
parties are representatives, not of two different contemporary civilizations, but of two
different contemporary elements in the body social of one and the same society (see
pp. 109-10, below).

xo2 AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY
through their contact with one another in the Space-dimension. A
classical example of this rather complicated concatenation of contacts in
divers dimensions is the part played in the ‘renaissance’ of the Hellenic
culture in the life of the Western Civilization in its Modern Age by the
Western Civilization’s contact with the main body of the sister civiliza¬
tion of Orthodox Christendom.

The importance of the Byzantine contribution to this Western
achievement must not, it is true, be over-estimated; for the West’s own
native tradition was fraught, like the Byzantine tradition, with the
cultural heritage of a Hellenism which was the common cultural back-

K und of both these affiliated civilizations; and, no doubt, the Western
:iety, as it came to maturity, would have conjured a renaissance of
Hellenism out of its own tradition in any event, even if it had never come
into contact with its Byzantine sister. A Western renaissance of Hellen¬
ism from the native Western tradition was in fact already taking place
on Western ground in Northern and Central Italy 1 —the precocious
nursery-garden of the Western Civilization in its modern phase*—
before the medieval encounter between the Western and Byzantine
worlds took the cultural form of conveying a knowledge of the Classical
Greek language, and the texts of works of Hellenic literature written in
Greek, to Italy from Constantinople. This conveyance of intellectual
treasure did not, indeed, take place till the fifteenth century of the
Christian Era, when the encounter between the two sister civilizations
was already four hundred years old and had produced such a bitter
estrangement that the Byzantine peoples were by then already acquies¬
cing in an Ottoman domination over the main body of Orthodox Christen¬
dom as a less unpleasant fate than the Western domination which was the
practical alternative then confronting all Orthodox Christians except the
Russians. Thus the fifteenth-century intellectual commerce between
Constantinople and Italy did not originate the Western renaissance of
Hellenism. Yet, though it did not originate it, it did enrich it—and this
to an extent that greatly heightened its potency.

The sample of the Hellenic cultural heritage that had been carried in
the native Western tradition was merely the jejune secondhand version
of it in the Latin language; and, if the West had been able to draw only
on these Grcckless cultural resources of its own, the Western renaissance
of Hellenism would have been a revocation of the Magnus Annus without
its quickening spring. The Western scholar-necromancers who were

5 As has been pointed out in IV. iv. 27s, n. 2, it was no accident that this native West¬
ern renaissance of Hellenism occurred in a province of the Medieval Western Christian
World that had previously forged ahead of the main body of Western Christendom by
making successful responses to local challenges.

* Sec I. i. 19. The cultural revolution in Transalpine Europe at the turn of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era, which had come to be called ‘the Renais¬
sance’, had been, in reality, not an evocation of a ghost of the dead Hellenic culture, but
a reception of a contemporary variation of the Western culture that had arisen in
Northern Ttaly and that had by that time forged so far ahead of the contemporary
Transalpine version of the same Western culture as to have become virtually a distinct
civilization. This sixtccnth-ccntury reception of a contemporary Italian culture in the
Transalpine provinces of the Western World had acquired its misnomer ‘renaissance’
because the Italian culture which was received at this time beyond the Alps had recently
enriched itself through a local Italian renaissance of Hellenism—first in its Latin dress
and thereafter in its original Greek embodiment (see IV. iv. 275, n. 1).

TYPES OF CONTACT OF CIVILIZATIONS 103
striving to evoke a ghost of Hellenism to inspire a Modern Western way
of life would hardly have produced the profound effect that they did
produce on Western history if the dingy changeling Latin dress in which
Hellenism had re-emerged from a Western store-cupboard had not been
supplemented by the authentic original garments of a dazzling Greek
texture which the West acquired from Byzantium at the eleventh hour.
The passive service which Byzantium thus performed for the West as
the ‘carrier’ of a treasure which the West did not merely take over but
succeeded in turning to profitable account had been estimated in the
following terms by a Modern Western humanist man of letters:

'The Byzantines had grave limitations for the work of traditio. But they
had the wisdom and the humility to see what their duty was, and the
constancy of mind to do it. They did preserve the old literature, though
they could not understand its value. They believed it was beautiful even
if they could not see the beauty. They believed it was full of wisdom and
virtue and the search for truth and for some forgotten thing called free¬
dom. And, though they understood neither the drama, nor the poetry,
nor the philosophy, nor even the history, they did at least copy letter by
letter the great books, which were destined, when they met with readers
capable of comprehending them, to bring about the rebirth of Civilization.’*

If the Byzantine Greek scholars could have risen from the dead to read
thi6 Western judgement on their work, no doubt they would have been
both surprised and incensed at finding themselves commended as con¬
scientious players of the part of a servant who, in the Parable of the
Talents, 1 is denounced by his master as ‘slothful’ and ‘wicked’. They
would have pointed out that, even if the five talents originally entrusted
to them to invest did eventually pass into the hands of an acquisitive
Western fellow servant of theirs who had received a beggarly single
talent as his own original allocation, the implication that they had
allowed those five talents to lie idle while they were in their keeping was
refuted by patent historical facts. How could the Byzantines be accused
of having laid up their legacy from Hellenism in a napkin or of having
hidden it in the earth, when the renaissances which they had actually
conjured out of it were commemorated by such eloquent monuments?
Did not the Byzantine ivory-carving of the eleventh and twelfth centur¬
ies of the Christian Era bear witness to a renaissance, at least in minia¬
ture, of an Hellenic art of sculpture in bas-relief? Was not the legislation
of the Macedonian Dynasty inspired by a Justinianean Hellenic Corpus
Iuris} And was not the establishment of the East Roman Empire by
Leo Syrus the revival of a Constantinian Hellenic universal state ? In the
light of these artistic, juristic, and political Byzantine achievements, 3
was it fair to convict the Byzantines, on an exclusively literary test, of
having failed to bring about a rebirth of Civilization ?

But, even (our Byzantine apologists might have gone on to protest)
if this Western indictment could have been proved against them, a
culpable omission, on their own part, to turn the talents entrusted to

' Murray, Gilbert: Greek Studies (Oxford 1946, University Pros), pp. 104-5.

a Matt. xxv. 14-30; Lukexix. 12-26. .

J A critique, from a Western standpoint, of these renaissances of Hellenism in
Orthodox Christendom will be found in IV. iv. 363, n. 1.

io 4 AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY
them to due account would not have automatically pilloried them in the
role of serving as ‘carriers’ of these talents for eventual transfer to their
Western neighbours. To have existed for the benefit of the West was not
(the Byzantines would insist) the Orthodox Christian Civilization’s
raison d'itre . 1 To minister to the West’s convenience was not an object
that any good Byzantines had ever intended to work for; and, if it should
turn out that Fate had played them the malicious trick of having set
them to work for the West inadvertently, either by transmitting to the
West the Byzantine legacy of Hellenism or by shielding the West against
direct assaults on the Arab Caliphate’s part from the Caliphate’s South-
West Asian base of operations, 2 this would be, for them, a cause of more
acute chagrin than any other incident in their tragic history.

To such Byzantine protests, however, a Westerner could make a
maliciously telling retort by demurely putting on record his sincere
testimonial to the benefits which the West had in fact received from the
main body of Orthodox Christendom both as a military shield against
the Arab Caliphate and as a cultural ‘carrier’ of Hellenism; and he could
point out both that, in the appraisal of benefits, the beneficiary neces¬
sarily has the last word, and that the West's own estimate of the benefits
that she had received from Byzantium would not be invalidated by a
Byzantine affidavit that the benefaction had been inadvertent or even
contrary to intent. It was a plain matter of historical fact that a
Western World which had been endeavouring to profit by the single
talent of Hellenic treasure that had been its own meagre trust fund had
been suddenly and enormously enriched in the fifteenth century by a
delivery from Byzantine into Western hands of the five talents that had
been the original portion of the more generously endowed sister society.
It was also (the Westerner would add) a matter of historical fact that
the transfer had been justified in the event by the cultural productivity
which the West had achieved after its cultural working capital had been
thus augmented by this transfer of an unexpended balance in the
Orthodox Christian Society’s cultural deposit account.

Whatever the final verdict might be on this cultural controversy
between Byzantium and the West, it was manifest that the episode out of
which it had arisen had been a concatenation of contacts between three
civilizations in two dimensions. An historical plot of this complicated

S ttern is not likely to present itself frequently, yet the particular per-
mance on which our attention has been fixed up to this point was not
the only one known to History. The role of serving as a cultural ‘carrier’,
which Byzantium had performed for the West in transmitting to her the
legacy of Hellenism in its original Greek embodiment, had likewise
been performed—through the transmission of comparable cultural
treasures—by the Arabic Muslim Civilization for the Ottoman province
of an Iranic Muslim World, and by the main body of the Far Eastern
Society for an offshoot of the Far Eastern Civilization in Japan.

When, in the course of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era,

. 1 For this naively egocentric conventional Western view of the East Roman Empire’s
historical role, see I. i. 156, with n. 1.

J See I. i. 156, with n. 1, and II. ii. 367-8.

TYPES OF CONTACT OF CIVILIZATIONS 105

almost the whole of the Arabic World, with the one notable exception of
Morocco, was progressively annexed by the 'Osmanlis, 1 the cultural
effect was to transmit to the Ottoman province of the Iranic World, in
the original classical Arabic form, 2 a legacy from a common Syriac past
which this Iranic sister civilization had inherited in a Persian dress in
its own native tradition. 3 It will be seen that this concatenation of cultural
contacts between the Iranic Muslim, Arabic Muslim, and Syriac civiliza¬
tions is formally parallel to the contemporary interplay between the
Western Christian, Orthodox Christian, and Hellenic civilizations,
though these two outwardly similar cultural episodes not only took
place in quite different political circumstances, but also produced sub¬
stantially different cultural effects, owing to a difference in relative
degree of vitality between cultural treasures that were transmitted
respectively by the Egyptians to the 'Osmanlis and by the Byzantines
to the Italians. 4 The cultural treasure that the ‘Osmanlis received via
Cairo from a dead Syriac culture’s Islamic last phase consisted mainly of
desiccated classical Islamic theology; and a corresponding legacy of
desiccated classical Confucian philosophy, from the treasure-house of a
dead Sinic Society, was all the Sinic treasure that was obtained in the
Tokugawa Age by a Japanese offshoot of the affiliated Far Eastern
Civilization via the main body of the same Far Eastern Civilization in
contemporary China.

These three episodes are examples of a compound type of contact
between civilizations which may be distinguished, as such, from other
kinds; but we shall find it more convenient to deal with these episodes
analytically, under the two heads of ‘encounters between contemporaries’
and ‘renaissances’, than to reserve them for separate study; and we may
now embark on our survey of ‘encounters between contemporaries’ with¬
out further preliminaries.

< See I. i. 348. Syria was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in a.d. 1516, and Egypt
(carrying with it the HijSz) in A.D. 1517- Algeria was acquired in a.d. 1516-18 (see pp.
220-1, below), ‘Iraq in a.d. 1534, and Tunisia (definitively) in A.D. 1574. The conquest
of the Yaman was completed in a.d. 1570. Sec further X. a. 37-38.

J See I. i. 395-6.

» See I. i. 71.

« See I. i. 396.

B 289S.nii

B. A SURVEY OF ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN
CONTEMPORARY CIVILIZATIONS

(I) A PLAN OF OPERATIONS

I N selling out to make a survey of encounters between contemporary
civilizations, we are confronted, as we were in attempting our original
survey of the societies between whom these encounters take place, 1 with
a formidably intricate maze of history; and now, as then, we shall be
well advised to look, before plunging into the thicket, for a favourable
point of entry. In our present enterprise this preliminary reconnaissance
is perhaps even more necessary than we found it to be on the earlier
occasion, since there is a considerably larger number of trees in the
wood which we have now to explore.

The number of civilizations that we originally located on our cultural
map was only twenty-one; 2 and, even if the progress of archaeological
discovery were to warrant us in regarding the Indus Culture as a separ¬
ate society from the Sumcric Civilization 1 and the Shang Culture as a
civilization antecedent to the Sinic, this change in our reckoning would
raise our total muster of civilizations only to twenty-three.

These twenty-one or twenty-three civilizations fall into two groups—
one originating in the Old World and the other in the New World—
if we classify them by their birthplaces; and either of these geographical
groups is distributed chronologically between more generations than
one—the actual number of generations up to date being two in the New
World and three in the Old World. In the earliest generation of the
Old-World series there are in any case four societies—the Egyptiac, the
Sumcric, the Minoan, and either the Sinic or else the Shang, if we
assign the Sinic to the second generation, instead of the first, on the
strength of the twentieth-century archaeologists’ achievement of dis¬
interring an antecedent Shang Culture—and the number rises to five
if we are to regard the Indus Culture as a distinct society and not as a
mere variety of the Sumcric Civilization. In the second generation of the
same series there arc in any case five societies—the Hellenic, the Syriac,
the Hittite, the Babylonic, and the Indie—and possibly six, if the Sinic
Society is to be classified as being a civilization with a predecessor. In the
third generation there are eight societies : 4 the Western, the main body of
Orthodox Christendom, an offshoot of Orthodox Christendom in Russia,
the Iranic Muslim, the Arabic Muslim, the Hindu, the main body of the
Far Eastern Society in China, and an offshoot of the Far Eastern Society
in Korea and Japan. In the New-World series there are two societies in
the first generation—the Andean and the Mayan—and two in the second :
the Yucatec and the Mexic.

' See I. i. 51-129. . 1 See I. i. 133.

1 Alternatively, the Indus Culture might be regarded as a mere ‘colonial’ variation
on the Sumcric (sec I. i. 107-8).

* A criticism of this count has been made by Prince Dmitri Obolensky (see pp. 669-
70 and 671, below).

A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 107

Manifestly the possible number of geographical encounters between
contemporary civilizations will have been restricted by the geographical
segregation of the civilizations on our list into two groups and by the
chronological segregation of the societies belonging to either geographi¬
cal group into different generations. Nevertheless, the total number of
encounters between civilizations that have been one another’s contem¬
poraries is notably larger than the total number of civilizations of all
generations in both geographical groups taken together. This at first
sight perhaps surprising arithmetical fact is accounted for by several
considerations.

In the first place it is possible for contemporary civilizations to have
more than one encounter with one another in the course of their histories,
and this possibility had been actually fulfilled not infrequently. For
example, the encounter between the Western, Orthodox Christian, and
Islamic societies, which was such a prominent motif in current history at
the time of writing, had been preceded by an encounter between the
same three parties during the so-called 'medieval' phase of Western
history; and this earlier encounter will prove to be a separate story
(though we shall find, as might be expected, that the two stories have
a connecting link).

The number of encounters between contemporary civilizations had
been further increased by chronological overlaps between the life-spans
of Old-World civilizations belonging to different generations. The
Egyptiac Civilization, for instance, was galvanized, as we have seen, by
the successive impacts of Hyksos, 'Sea Peoples’, Assyrians, Persians,
and Macedonians into going on living so long beyond its normal expecta¬
tion of life that it encountered as contemporaries, not only two civiliza¬
tions of its own generation—the Sumcric and the Minoan—but also
four civilizations of the next generation: the Babylonic, Hittite, Syriac,
and Hellenic.

Again, the civilizations belonging to this second generation in the
Old-World series did not all come to birth or all go into dissolution at
exactly the same date. The Babylonic, Indie, and Hittite civilizations
seemed to have emerged from a post-Sumeric interregnum in the
fourteenth century b.c.; the Syriac and Hellenic civilizations emerged
from a post-Minoan interregnum in the twelfth century b.c.; and the
emergence of the Sinic Civilization might have to be dated as late as the
ninth or the eighth century b.c. if it proved to have been preceded by a
distinctively separate Shang Culture whose universal state had gone
into dissolution in either the twelfth or the eleventh century b.c., accord¬
ing to our choice between two alternative traditional Sinic chronologies.
The dates at which these six Old-World civilizations of the second
generation went into dissolution were still farther removed from one
another than the dates of their births. While the Hittite Civilization was
overwhelmed as early as the twelfth millennium B.c. by the very
Volkerwanderung that preceded the Hellenic and the Syriac Society’s
emergence, the Babylonic Society did not go into dissolution till the
first century of the Christian Era, the Sinic Society not till the second
century of the same era, and the Hellenic Society not till the fourth

io8 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
century. As for the Syriac and Indie societies, they lived on, like the
Egyptiac, beyond their normal expectation of life, and this for the same
reason. The course of their disintegration was interrupted by the impact
of an alien society, and this interruption, in which the intruder was the
Hellenic Society in both cases, prolonged the life of the Indie Society
into the fifth century of the Christian Era and the life of the Syriac
Society into the tenth century. 1 In consequence, the Syriac Society
encountered as contemporaries not only one civilization of an older
generation than its own—the Egyptiac—and other civilizations of its
own generation—the Hellenic, Babylonic, and Indie—but also some of
the civilizations of the succeeding generation—the Western Christian, the
Orthodox Christian both in its main body and in its Russian offshoot,
the Hindu, and the main body of the Far Eastern Society.

Moreover, some of the debris of disintegrating civilizations of the
second generation in the Old World had been preserved, as we have seen,
in a ‘fossilized’ state. The oldest example was the fossil of the Hittite
Civilization which had survived, after that society’s premature extinc¬
tion, astride the Taurus and Antitaurus mountain ranges in South-
Eastern Anatolia and Northern Syria. These fossil remains of the
Hittite Society were eventually absorbed into the bodies social of the
Syriac and Hellenic societies, but other extinct civilizations had left
fossils that were still extant at the time of writing. The Jews and Parsecs
and the Nestorian, Monophysitc, and Monothelete Christians were
fossils of the Syriac Civilization deposited in two strata representing two
stages in an encounter between the Syriac Society and Hellenism in the
course of the Syriac Society’s disintegration, while the Hinayanian
Buddhists of Ceylon, Burma, Siam, and Cambodia and the ’lantric
Mahayanian Buddhists of Tibet and Mongolia were similar fossils
representing corresponding stages in the parallel history of an Indie
Society whose disintegration had likewise been interrupted and re¬
tarded by an encounter with the same Hellenic intruder.

These fossils had survived to encounter, as contemporaries, civiliza¬
tions that had not emerged until after the death of those civilizations by
which the fossils themselves had been precipitated. The fossil of the
Hittite Civilization, for instance, had lingered on to encounter the Syriac,
Babylonic, and Hellenic civilizations; the Jewish relic of the Syriac Civili¬
zation had encountered the Arabic Muslim, Iranic Muslim, Orthodox
Christian, and Western civilizations; the Parsecs had encountered the
Hindu, Iranic Muslim, and Western civilizations; the Nestorians had
encountered not only the same three civilizations as the Parsees, but
the Arabic Muslim and Far Eastern civilizations and the Tantric
Mahayanian fossil of the Indie Civilization as well; the Monophysites
had encountered the Arabic Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Western,
and Hindu civilizations; the Monotheletes, the Arabic Muslim, Orthodox
Christian, and Western; the Hinayanian relics of the Indie Civilization

« Reckoning the interregnum following the break-up of a restored Syriac universal
state to have begun, in the domain of the Abbasid Caliphate, with the Fitimid Katama
Berbers’ occupation of Egypt in a.d. 969, and, in the domain of the Andalusian umayyad
Caliphate, with the break-up of the Umayyad realm into indigenous parochial successor-
atates in the early years of the eleventh century of the Christian Era.

A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 109

had encountered the Hindu, Far Eastern, Western, and Arabic; the Tan-
tric Mahayanian Buddhists had encountered the Hindu, Far Eastern,
Western, and Iranic.

This long list of multiple collisions and contacts does not tell the
whole tale of encounters to which a ‘fossil’ had been one of the parties.
In the histories of the Syriac and the Indie Civilization, for example, in
which fossils had been deposited during the lifetime of the society in
strata representing stages in an encounter between this society and an
intrusive Hellenism, the divers fossil forms that the victimized society
had assumed under the impact of an alien social force had in either case
had subsequent encounters with a later form that the same society had
assumed in the act of eventually ejecting the alien intruder. The Jewish
and Parsee fossils and the Nestorian, Monophysitc, and Monothclete
Christian fossils of the Syriac Society all encountered the Syriac Society
itself in its last phase under the regime of an Islamic Caliphate that was
a post-Hellenic resumption of the Achacmenian Empire. Similarly, the
Hinayanian Buddhist and the Tantric Mahayanian Buddhist fossils of
the Indie Society encountered the Indie Society itself in its correspond¬
ing last phase under the regime of a Hindu Guptan Empire that was a
post-Hellenic resumption of the Empire of the Mauryas.

In these two cases we see an encounter between contemporaries taking
place within the bosom of a single society between different sub-
societies into which this society has articulated itself, and this 'internal’
type of encounter is not represented solely by cases in which one of the
parties to it is a fossil. In studying the growths of civilizations, we have
found 1 that the regular social process through which a growing society
advances from one stage in its growth to another is a compound move¬
ment in which a creative individual or minority first withdraws from
the common life of the society, then works out, in seclusion, a solution
for some problem with which the society as a whole is confronted, and
finally re-enters into communion with the rest of the society in order to
help it forward on its road by imparting to it the results of the creative
work which the temporarily secluded individual or minority has accom¬
plished during the interval between withdrawal and return. Manifestly
the impact of the returning creative individual or minority on the un-
creative rank-and-file of the society within whose bosom the process of
withdrawal-and-return occurs is another form of encounter between
contemporaries in which the parties are all members of a single civiliza¬
tion. Cases in point, which have come to our attention already, 2 are the
‘Ionization’ of the Hellenic Society, in the transition from a first to a
second chapter of its growth, through the impact of a temporarily
secluded Ionian creative minority on the rest of the Hellenic body social;
the ‘Atticization’ of the same Hellenic Society, in the transition from the
second to a third chapter of its growth, by the similar impact of a like¬
wise temporarily secluded Athenian creative minority; the ‘Italianiza-
tion’ of the Western Society, in the transition from a second to a third
chapter of its growth, by the impact of a temporarily secluded North
Italian creative minority; and the ‘Anglicization’ of the same Western
I In III. iii. 248-377- 2 !n M- “»• 33 ^- 63 -

no ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Society, in the transition from the third to a fourth chapter of its growth,
by the impact of a temporarily secluded English creative minority.

Such encounters within the bosom of a single society are authentic
instances of the phenomenon of contact between contemporaries,
whether the internal articulation of the society which makes this type of
encounter possible has been produced by the withdrawal of a creative
individual or minority or by the precipitation of a fossil. We have also
still to take note of a further set of encounters between contemporaries
of the more usual kind, in which the parties to the encounters are
different civilizations and not merely different representatives of a single
civilization.

The last factor that had multiplied the number of geographical en¬
counters between different contemporary societies had been the fusion
of the New-World with the Old-World group as a result of the conquest
of the Ocean by the Western Christian Civilization in the ‘modern’
chapter of its history (currebat circa a.d. 1475-1875). The impact of this
Old-World society on the Mexic, Yucatec, and Andean societies across
the Atlantic had been the first notable case, if not the first known case, of
‘inter-hemispheric’ contact. 1

This achievement of the Modern Western Civilization is an historical
landmark; and it may give us a clue to finding our point of entry into the
historical maze that we have undertaken to explore.

When, in the course of the fifteenth century of the Christian Era,
West European mariners mastered the technique of oceanic navigation,
they thereby won a means of physical access to all the inhabited and
habitable lands on the face of the planet; and their conquest of the
Ocean had in fact resulted, by the time of writing, in the establishment
of contact between a Western Society that had originated on the North
Atlantic seaboard of the Old World and all other living societies—not
excluding those primitive societies that, before Western explorers tracked
them down, had been secluded in a virtual isolation in such natural
fastnesses as the tropical forests in the heart of Africa, Borneo, and New
Guinea, the jungle-clad mountains in the borderland between India,
China, and Tibet, and the uninviting extremities of Asia and South
America: an Arctic North-Eastern Siberia and an Antarctic Tierra del
Fucgo. 2 In the lives of all these other living societies the impact of the
West had come to be the paramount social force and ‘the Western
Question’ had come to be the fateful issue. As the Western pressure on
them had increased—and, so far, it had been increasing in a geometrical
progression of growing severity—their lives had been turned upside
down; and it was not only the frail social fabric of the surviving primi-

1 The possibility that, in a pre-Columbian Age, the Plains Indian* of North America
had already borrowed the composite bow from an Old-World Eurasian Nomad Society
is noticed on p. 638, below.

2 These holes and comers in the Oihoument —which had afforded an asylum for a
rearguard of primitive Mankind because their inaccessibility or unattractiveness had
exempted them from invasion by any of the civilizations before the literally world-wide
expansion of a Modern Western representative of this aggressive parvenue species of
human society—had also served as preserves for religious practices and beliefs which
might perhaps prove to be relics of a purer, as well as older, religion than the idolatry
to which Man in Process of Civilization had succumbed before the eventual epiphany of
the historic higher religions (sec VII. vii. 739-68).

A PLAN OF OPERATIONS in

tive societies that had been pulverized; the living non-Western civiliza¬
tions had been convulsed, and even the petrified fossils of a previous
generation of civilizations had been corroded, by this literally world¬
wide revolution of Western origin. The Western Society alone had
appeared at first to remain unaffected, in its own life, by the havoc that
it was thus making of the rest of the World; but, within the lifetime of
the writer of this Study, one of the encounters between the West and its
contemporaries had come to darken the horizon of the Western Society
itself.

The dominating role in Western affairs that had thus come to be
played by a collision between the West and a foreign body social was
a novel feature in recent Western history; and the date at which this
new situation had arisen could be established with some precision by a
reading of the index of power politics. From the failure of the second
Ottoman assault on Vienna in a . d . 1683 to the defeat of Germany in the
General War of a . d . 1939-45, the West as a whole had been so over¬
whelmingly superior in power to the rest of the World in the aggregate 1
that the fluctuations in a balance of power between Great Powers that
were all either Western or Westernized in their culture had been the
most important military, political, and economic phenomena in the
World during that quarter of a millennium. 3 Throughout that period
the Western Powers virtually had nobody to reckon with outside their
own circle, and, on the material plane, the destiny of all Mankind outside
that circle was therefore determined, in that age, by the course of the
mutual relations between those Western Powers. This Western mono¬
poly of power in the World came to an end, however, when, after the
war of a . d . 1939-45, Germany's bid for world domination, which had
been the previous Leitmotiv in the play of power politics, gave place to
the new Leitmotiv of a competition for the same prize between the
United States and the Soviet Union. In itself, of course, this reversal of
the relation between the two principal victors in a war in which their
principal adversary had suffered a crushing defeat was an incident in the
play of political dynamics that, so far from being unusual, might have
been predicted as almost inevitable in the light of past precedents. A
drastic change in the balance was always apt to be reflected in a corres¬
pondingly drastic change in the constellation of political forces. If, how¬
ever, we go beyond this rather superficial consideration of the formal
dynamics of the Balance of Power to take account of the characters of

> Sec III. iii. 200.

1 In I. i. 33-34 it ha* been pointed out that, in this age, the Western Society had
become so sure of its own predominance in the World that it had cessed to have any
collective name of its own in its own vocabulary. The West now no longer felt a need
to distinguish itself by a proper name from other societies which it no longer regarded
as its equals. When all the members of all the living non-Wcstem societies were con¬
founded together in Western minds under the negative label ‘Natives', the correlative
term on Western lips could only be 'civilized people*—with the implication that there
could be no such thing as Civilization in any non-Westem way of life. This Modem
Western identification of Civilization with Western Civilization was a secularized ver¬
sion of the Primitive Western Christian proposition: 'Nemini salus ... nisi in Ecclesifl'
(Cyprianus, Th. C.: Ep. iv, chap. 4. Cp. beCatholicaeBccUtiaeUnitale. chap. 6: ‘Habere
non potest Deum patrem qui Ecclesiam non habet matrem.'—‘ “Salus”, inquit
[Cyprianus),"extra Ecclesiam non cst" ’—Saint Augustine: DcDaptimo contra Donatiitas,
Book IV, chap, xvii (39)).

Hz ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the dramatis personae, we shall see that, in one vital point, the re-
alinement of political forces in and after a.d. 1945 was different in kind
from any previous alinement since the Ottoman Empire’s fall out of the
race for world power in a.d. 1683. After 1945, for the first time since
1683 in the histories of the West and of the World, one of the protagon¬
ists in power politics was once again a Power of a non-Wcstern com¬
plexion.

There was, it is true, an ambiguity, that has come to our notice in
previous contexts, 1 in the relation of both the Soviet Union and the
Communist ideology to the Western Civilization.

The Soviet Union was the political heir of a Petrine Russian Empire
which had become a voluntary convert to the Western way of life at the
turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had participated
thereafter in the Western game of power politics as a proselyte admitted
on a tacit understanding that he would abide by the accepted Western
rules. Communism, again, was in origin, like Liberalism 2 and Fascism,
one of the secular ideologies that had arisen in the Modern West as sub¬
stitutes for a Christianity which the West had, in effect, discarded. And
thus, from one point of view, the competition which, since a . d . 1945,
had arisen between the Soviet Union and the United States for hege¬
mony in the World, and between Communism and Liberalism for the
ideological allegiance of Mankind, might still be regarded as a domestic
issue within the household of a Western Society that had opened its
doors to admit a Russian apostate from the civilization of Orthodox
Christendom to become an adopted member of the Western family.

From another point of view, however, the Soviet Union could be
looked upon, like its Petrine predecessor, as a Russian Orthodox
Christian universal state clinging to life in a Western dress which it had
been led to adopt, not by any positive desire to change its cultural
allegiance, but by its very will to go on living a distinctive life of its own
in an OikoumenS whose cultural climate had latterly become so bleakly
Westernized that life on Earth was now no longer possible without some
measure of adaptation to Western ways. From the same angle of vision,
Communism could be looked upon as an ideological substitute, not for
Western, but for Orthodox, Christianity, in ex-Orthodox Christian
hearts that had become so far Westernized that they had ceased to find
their ancestral religion tenable without having lost the traditional Russian
repugnance towards accepting any faith that was held orthodox in the
West. On this interpretation the failure of Liberalism, in the long run, to
win the Russians’ allegiance would be accounted for by its being branded
as a secular Modem Western Society’s orthodox ideology, 3 while the
victory of Communism in Russia would be accounted for by its being
signalized as a secular Modern Western creed which was a revolutionary

* Sec III. iii. 200-2 and 563-5.

3 Using: rhe term, not in the narrower sense in which, in the nineteenth-century party
politics of the United KinRdom, it had stood for the opposite of'Conservatism’, but in
the wider meaning of the Modem Western way of life which was called 'Capitalism'
by its critics and ‘Free Enterorise’ by its advocates.

3 From the standpoint of Christianity, of course, Liberalism, as well as Communism
and Fascism, was a heresy.

A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 113

critique of the orthodox secular Modern Western way of life and was
therefore an abominable heresy in orthodox secular Modern Western
eyes. On this showing, Communism would be an ideally convenient and
attractive faith for Russians whose only recourse was to fight the Modern
West with its own weapons in a conflict between contending civilizations
in which the Russians were still determined not to lay down their arms,
but in which none but Modern Western weapons were any longer of
any avail.

At the time of writing, each of these two alternative interpretations of
the spirit of Soviet Communism and the role of the Soviet Union
manifestly expressed some measure of the truth, and at the same time it
was still impossible to forecast whether the Westernizing or the anti-
Western tendency would ultimately prevail in Russian life. Short of that,
however, it was unquestionable that a sharp re-accentuation of the anti-
Western tendency in Russian feeling and thought had been one conse¬
quence of the Russian Communist Revolution of a . d . 1917, and that, in
view of the potency of this phobia in the Russian Communist £thos, the
emergence of the Soviet Union from the General War of a . d . 1939-45
as one of two rival World Powers had reintroduced a cultural conflict
into a political arena which, for some 250 years past, had been reserved
for domestic political quarrels between Powers that had, all alike, been
of one Modern Western cultural complexion.

At the time of writing, this duel on the political plane between the
Soviet Union and the United States and on the cultural plane between
Communism and Liberalism was beclouding the whole social horizon
of the living generation of Mankind. Yet this concentration of the
World’s attention and apprehension on this particular encounter be¬
tween two contemporary civilizations was in no sense presumptive
evidence that the Russo-Western conflict would continue to occupy the
whole field. In re-engaging in their struggle against Westernization
after having apparently long since given up the battle for lost, the
Russians were setting an example which had already been followed by
the Chinese and which might well be followed, in time, by the Japanese,
Hindus, and Muslims, and even by societies that had become so deeply
dyed with a Western colour as the main body of Orthodox Christendom
in South-Eastern Europe and the three submerged pre-Columbian
civilizations in the New World. The reopening of the particular issue
between the West and Russia had, in fact, incidentally reopened the
general issue between the West and the non-Western majority of Man¬
kind.

These considerations suggest that a scrutiny of the encounters be¬
tween the Modem West and the other living civilizations might prove a
convenient point of departure for embarking on a survey of the whole
field of encounters between contemporaries. The next set of encounters
that would present itself for examination on this plan of operations would
be the encounters of the non-Western living civilizations with one another.
And, when we had thus completed our review of encounters between all
civilizations still alive, the obvious next step—if our plan had justified
itself by its results so far—would be to single out, among civilizations

1 X 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
now extinct, those which, at some stage in their history, had made on
their neighbours an impact comparable to the West’s impact on its corn-
temporaries—even though, in these earlier cases, the action might not
have been literally world-wide. On these lines we might find ourselves
able to work our way into the heart of the thicket, break up the tangled
terrain into manageable tracts, and piece together a general map of the
landscape by surveying each tract in turn—without committing ourselves
to examining every single encounter between contemporary civilizations
that had found its way into our inventor)'. 1

If we follow this plan by starting operations with the set of encounters
to which the Modern Western Society had been a party, there is, how¬
ever, still one preliminary point to be settled. We have still to determine
the date at which the ‘modern’ chapter of Western history begins.

Non-Western observers would date its beginning from the moment
when the first Western ships made a landfall on their coasts; for, in
non-Westcrn eyes, Homo Occidentals, like Life itself according to one
Modem Western scientific hypothesis, 3 was a creature of marine origin.
Far Eastern scholars, for example, when they set eyes on their first
specimens of Western humanity in the Age of the Ming, labelled the
new arrivals ‘South Sea Barbarians’ on the evidence of their immediate
geographical provenance and their apparent level of culture. In this and
other encounters the ubiquitous Modem Western mariners went through
a series of rapid metamorphoses in their human victims’ bewildered eyes.
At their first landing, they looked like harmless marine animalculae of a
previously unknown breed; soon they revealed themselves, by their
aggressive behaviour, to be savage sea-monsters; and finally they proved
to be predatory amphibians who, unhappily for Mankind, were as
mobile on dry land as in their own clement. This marine epiphany of a
Protean carnivore marks the beginning of the Modern Age of Western
history from a non-Western point of view; and this chronological
reckoning in the objective terms of the Modem West’s impact on the rest
of the World tallies closely with the Modern West’s own dating of its
genesis in the subjective terms of a psychological break, in Modern
Western souls, with the Modem West’s own past.

From the Modem West’s own point of view, its modernity had begun
at the moment when Western Man had thanked, not God, but himself
that he was as different a being from his ‘medieval’ predecessor as the
Pharisee claimed to be from the publican in the parable. 3 The cultural
Pharisaism of the Modern Western peoples on the Atlantic seaboard of
Europe dated, like their technological conquest of the Ocean, from the
turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era, and we
can name the objective revolutionary event which had brought about
this subjective revolution in an ocean-faring Western Man’s mind. The
Western peoples on the Atlantic seaboard of Europe who, in the sixteenth
century, launched out on the face of the deep and made their way as far

1 For example, the encounters, enumerated on pp. 108-9, above, in which one of the
parties had been a ‘fossil', arc not all examined in IX b (ii), below.

J This hypothesis was, of course, a version, couched in a Modem Western scientific
idiom, of the Hellenic myth of the genesis of the goddess of procreation, Aphrodite, from
the foam of the sea. J Luke xviii. 11.

A PLAN OF OPERATIONS u 5

and wide as its waters could carry them took the same contemptuous
view of their own fifteenth-century ancestors as the fifteenth-century
Italians had taken of these Transalpine and Transmediterranean Western
contemporaries of theirs when they had stigmatized them as ‘barbarians’ ; l
and the sixteenth-century Spaniards, Portuguese, French, English, and
Dutch had in fact taken over this point of view from its Italian origina¬
tors. They had taken it over as part of their reception of a local Italian
form of the Western culture that had differentiated itself during the later
Middle Ages. 2 It was in virtue of this Italianization that these sixteenth-
century Westerners beyond the bounds of Italy had become conscious
of a breach of cultural continuity between themselves and their own
immediate local predecessors, and this conversion of the non-Italian
Western peoples to the Italians’ way of life had likewise occurred at the
turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 3

Our criteria thus agree in supporting the traditional dating of the emer¬
gence of the Modern Western World in the last quarter of the fifteenth
century. 4 The Italianization of a ‘barbarian’ majority of the Western
Society, the converts' repudiation of their pre-Italianate past, and
the conquest of the Ocean by the Italianized Western peoples on the
Atlantic seaboard of Europe all occurred in this generation. On this
showing, we need not hesitate to accept this date as marking the
emergence of a Modern Western Society that had proceeded to make an

1 See III. iii. 299-310.

2 On pp. 109-10, above, we have already noticed that this impact of Northern Italy on

the rest of Western Christendom at the transition from the ’medieval’ to the ‘modem’
age of Western history is an instance of the ‘internal’ type of encounter within the bosom
of a single civilization. J See V. vi. 340-1.

* On the subjective criterion of feeling, the Italians, of course, had been ‘modern’
since at least the thirteenth century, and the Flemings since at least the fourteenth; but,
for rite purpose of the present enterprise of making a survey of encounters between
civilizations that have been one another’s contemporaries, it would be a mistake to
include the Italians’ encounters with their non-Westem neighbours among the Modern
West’s encounters on the strength of this subjective criterion alone. In the expansion
of the Modern West over the face of the whole World since the last quarter of the fif¬
teenth century of the Christian Era, Italy had plaved little part beyond Genoa’s some¬
what passive role as the birthplace of Columbus. While the Western peoples along the
European seaboard of the Atlantic were opening up new worlds across the Ocean, the
Italians were content to remain landlocked within the shores of the Mediterranean and,
within these relatively narrow maritime confines, to play out the last rounds of a game
which had already become a losing one by the time when, at the turn of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, the West European peoples had snatched victory for the West
out of defeat in her relations with her neighbours by turning their backs on a familiar
Mediterranean and committing themselves to a previously untamed Atlantic. At this
turning-point in Western history the Atlantic Western peoples were moved to abandon
the Mediterranean, and the Italians to cling to it, not merely by the divergent influences
of their respective geographical locations, but also—and this perhaps more imperatively
—by the historical fact that, in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the
Italians—thanks precisely to their precocious achievement of modernity in this last

I ihase of she ‘medieval’ chapter of Western history—had succeeded in entering into the
ibours of their Transalpine and Tranrmediterrancan fellow Western Christians—
Catalans, Aragonese, Navarrese, Castilians, Normans, French, English, Germans—
whose partners they had been in the aggressive expansion of a Medieval Western
Christendom across the Mediterranean at the expense of the East Roman Empire and
the successor-states of the ‘Abbasid and Andalusian Umayyad caliphates. Details of this
transformation of Crusader principalities into Venetian, Genoese, and Florentine
colonial empires will be found in III. iii. 347, n. 1. This Italian epilogue to the history
of the medieval encounter between the Western, Syriac, and Orthodox Christian socie¬
ties dragged on till as late as a.d. 1797, when the termination of Venetian rule over the
Ionian Islands liquidated the last remnant of the last Italian colonial empire in the
Levant.

1x6 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
impact on all the rest of Mankind. In the light of this chronological
conclusion, however, we may prognosticate that, however well this
literally world-wide impact of the West may serve our turn as a ‘bull¬
dozer’ for forcing an entry into the historical jungle of intertwined
cultural entanglements which we have set ourselves to explore, it will
be of less avail for our purpose when we pass on from this preliminary
survey of the facts to our ulterior enterprises of attempting to analyse,
first the plot of the play, 1 and then the process of psychological action
and reaction in the relations between the actors. 1

In these two inquiries, Time is of the essence of the problem, since
the psychological reverberations of collisions between contemporary
societies do not produce their ultimate social effects until they have
travelled down below the upper surface of the Psyche—over which the
conscious Will and Intellect skate as swiftly as water-spiders on the
surface of an unfathomable tarn—and have stirred the obstinately slow-
moving depths of the underlying abyss of the Subconscious. However
quickly the conscious clement in the psyche of a human being whose
social environment has been disturbed by the impact of alien cultural
influences may succeed in adjusting its thought and action to the new
social predicament that the impact has produced, this superficial re¬
orientation is not effective in itself, since the Intellect alone moves
nothing, 3 while the Will is only effective to the degree in which it
succeeds in inducing the Subconscious Reservoir of the Psyche to lend
itself to the Will’s aim by suffering the Will to draw upon this amor¬
phous yet exclusive source of psychic energy and to put it to work by
canalizing it into a deliberate effort to attain some definite objective.
The pace at which the subconscious element in the Psyche habitually
moves is thus not merely the limiting, but the governing, factor in the
determination of the time that an encounter between two contemporary
civilizations will take, from first to last, to work itself out; and the usual
Time-scale of the workings of the Subconscious in this province of the
realm of social life had been of a much higher order of magnitude than
the 450 years which, at the time of writing, was the utmost length of time
during which the impact of the Modern West had so far been making
itself felt in the life of any of its contemporaries.

The relative shortness of a span of not more than four and a half cen¬
turies in this particular social and psychological context becomes mani¬
fest as soon as we turn our attention from the set of encounters in which
a living Modern Western Society had been engaged with other living
societies to encounters in which a living historian could feel confident
that he was in a position to know the whole story because the parties to
these encounters were none of them any longer alive.

If we measure off the history of the impact of the Modern West on
its contemporaries, down to the time of writing, against the history of
the impact of the Hellenic Civilization, in the corresponding chapter of
its history, on the Hittite, Syriac, Egyptiac, Babylonic, Indie, and Sinic

' In Part IX C, below. . J In Part IX D. below.

* Jiafna S’ aM) ovO(v KiveT. —Aristotle: Ethica Nicomaehea, Z, 2 (p. 1139 a),
quoted in III. iii. 231, n. 1.

ii7

A PLAN OF OPERATIONS
societies, and if, for purposes of this chronological comparison, we
equate, as we reasonably may, 1 Alexander’s crossing of the Hellespont
in 334 b.c. with Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic in a.d. 1492, the
four and a half centuries that bring us down to the year a.d. 1952 in the
Modern Western record will bring us, in the equivalent ‘Modern
Hellenic’ record, to the year a.d. 126; and this date is only a few years
later than the probable date of the correspondence on the question of
policy towards the Christians which passed between the Younger Pliny
and the Emperor Trajan when Pliny was serving as the Emperor’s
special high commissioner in the Roman imperial province of Bithynia
and Pontus.

In a Hellenizing World early in the second century of the Christian
Era the Christian Church loomed no larger, in the sight of an Hcllenically
educated dominant minority, than the Baha’i and Ahmadi sects 2 were
figuring in the sight of the corresponding class in a Westernizing World
mid-way through the twentieth century. In a generation in which the
supremacy of a sceptical philosophy was ‘palpable and audible’ on the
intellectual surface of Hellenic life, what rational Hellene could have
divined that, in a subconscious psychic abyss below the seemingly well-
founded basis of his own philosophical Weltanschauung, a ‘determina¬
tion’ was 'slowly maturing’ in the hearts of the people of his world 'to
put themselves under the authority of a new dogma’,* and that this slow
long-term spiritual tendency was moving, with a current as powerful as
it was imperceptible, towards a triumph of Christianity over Hellenism
within two hundred years of Pliny’s and Trajan’s day? This historical
parallel—and it is a legitimate one—indicates how utterly the future
might be hidden in a.d. 1952 from the mental vision of a Western
student of the impact of the West on the World who happened to have
been born only four hundred years after the beginning of this set of
encounters between living civilizations.

Moreover, our parallel between a Modern Western and an analogous
Hellenic impact on a contemporary world gives us the further indication
that, in reckoning the Modern Western impact to have been at work
for some four hundred and fifty years down to the time of writing, we
have been operating with a figure that represents a maximum and is
considerably higher than the average.

It w r as only in the impact of Western Christendom on the indigenous
civilizations of the New World that the equivalent of Alexander’s con¬
quest of the Achaemenian Empire had occurred at a corresponding date
in the Time-chart of Western history. The Spaniards’ conquest of

1 The parallel holds good in subjective, as well as in objective, terms. Objectively,
Alexander’s march from the Hellespont to the Hydaspes ia comparable in scale with
da Gama's voyage from Lisbon to India and with Columbus's from Palo* to the New World:
subjectively, the post-Alexandrine Hellene* took the reception of an Attic version of
Hellenism in Macedonia, and the Atticizcd Macedonians’ conquest of the Achaemenian
Empire, a* marking the beginning of a new era in Hellenic history as definitely as the
Western peoples of the Atlantic seaboard of Europe felt their own Modem Age to be
marked off from its ‘medieval’ predecessor by their reception of Italian culture and their
conquest of the Ocean (see V. vi. 339 and 342, and VI. vii. 299-300).

J Sec V. v. 174-6.

1 Bevan, Edwyn Robert: Stoics and Sceptics (Oxford 1913, Clarendon Press), pp.
140-1, quoted in V. V. 558.

1x8 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Mexico and the rest of Central America in and after a.d. 1521, and of the
Inca Empire and the rest of the Andean World in and after a.d. 1533,
had corresponded in its date, as well as in the crude violence of its
physical force and the shattering subversivcncss of its psychological
effect, to the conquest of the Egyptiac, Syriac, and Babylonic worlds by
Alexander’s Macedonians. In the World as a whole, however, the mari¬
time expansion of the Modem West had had to pay for its ubiquity by
being slower in taking political and cultural effect than the overland
expansion of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism. While the comparatively
fragile civilizations of the New World had been overwhelmed at the first
onset of the militant landing-parties from ocean-going Spanish ships,
not one single province of one single non-Westcm civilization in the
Old World had been conquered, more Alexandrino, by Western force of
arms before the campaigns (gerebantur a.d. 1757-60) which had resulted
in the British East India Company’s acquiring a virtual sovereignty over
Bengal and Bihar, and it had not been till the launching of a British
offensive against the MarSthas on all Indian fronts in a.d. 1803 that any
Modem Western empire-builders on non-Western ground cast of the
Atlantic had made lightning conquests on the scale of Alexander of
Maccdon’s sweep from the Hellespont to the Caspian Gates in 334-330
b.c. or Demetrius of Bactria’s sweep over Northern India in 183 B.c.

Furthermore, when we pass on from the spectacle of the forcible
imposition of an alien civilization through acts of military conquest to
consider the voluntary reception of it through a process of cultural con¬
version, we find that, in this field, the duration of the process down to
the year a . d . 1952 had been, in the Old World, not 450 years, but some
250 at the longest.

The attempts of Western intruders in the Early Modern Age of
Western history to propagate an integrally Christian Western culture
in partibus Orientis had, in the end, all been signally defeated, after
apparently promising starts, by outbursts of xenophobia in the mission
fields that had been as decisive as they had been vehement. The Japanese
had put an end to a Western Christian cultural penetration between
a.d. 1614 and a.d. 163s; 1 the contemporary Abyssinians had taken
parallel action in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century; 2 the
Chinese had taken it at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. 3 It had not been till the last quarter of the seventeenth century
that the West had begun to make peaceful cultural conquests that, by
a.d. 1952, had proved themselves more durable, at least, than the
sixteenth-century fiascos, unwarrantable though it would still have been
to assume that they were to prove permanent.

The version of the Modern Western culture that had thus at last
begun to make headway in the Old World, some two hundred years after
the Western conquest of the Ocean, was not the full-blooded Western
Christian Civilization which the Abyssinians, Japanese, and Chinese had
rejected after making trial of it; it was a secular abstract from it, 4

1 See II. ii. 366, n. 2; V. v. 365; and pp. 316-24, below.

1 See II. ii. 366. J Sec V. v. 365-7, and pp. 3*6-24, below.

4 As the present writer sees it, an elimination of Religion, not an introduction of

A PLAN OF OPERATIONS

”9

strained off in a cynically negative spirit by a late-scvcntccnth-century
generation of Westerners who had become alienated from Christianity
itself in their revulsion from Wars of Religion which, in the domestic life
of Western Christendom for 150 years past, had been running an ever
more devastating yet never any more conclusive course; 1 and, since an
exotic potion is the less hard to swallow, the thinner and more tasteless
the brew, 2 it is no surprise—and also assuredly no accident—that the
generation which witnessed this spiritual revolution in the bosom of the
Western World should also have witnessed a revulsion in the feelings of
Orthodox Christian peoples towards the Western culture.

In the fifteenth century, Orthodox Christians had acquiesced in the
political domination of the Muslim 'Osmanlis as a less odious alternative
than a reception of the Western Christian way of life in the then current
religious terms of acknowledging the ecclesiastical supremacy of the
Pope. Towards the close of the seventeenth century the descendants of
these same Orthodox Christians eagerly inscribed themselves as pupils
in a new-model Western school in which Technology had been sub¬
stituted for Theology as the obligatory principal subject. This revolution
in the Orthodox Christian attitude towards the West in response to the
West’s own revolutionary revaluation of traditional Western spiritual

Science, was the essence of the seventeenth-century Western cultural revolution. The
scientific outlook, in itself, was not at that time a novelty in the Western Society's
spiritual constitution. It had been an ingredient in the Western Weltanschauung ever
since the twelfth-century Aristotelian renaissance (see X. i*. 45-48). What was new was
the elevation of Science from a subordinate position, in which it had been made to
serve as Religion's handmaid, to the throne from which Religion had now been ig-
nominiously ejected; and this revolutionary rise in Science's prestige in Western eyes,
and revolutionary liberation of Science in the West from traditional religious checks and
balances, were the innovations that now gave the Western Civilization its new ithos and
its new penetrative power in its impacts on alien bodies social.

This would be the present writer’s commentary on the following striking passage in
one of Professor Herbert Butterfield's works:

'The seventeenth century . . . did not merely bring a new factor into history in the
way we often assume—one that must just be added, so to speak, to the other permanent
factors. The new factor immediately began to elbow at the other ones, pushing them out
of their places, and, indeed, began immediately to seek control of the rest, as the apostles
of the new movement had declared their intention of doing from the very start. The
result was the emergence of a kind of Western Civilization which when transmitted to
Japan operates on tradition there as it operates on tradition here—dissolving it and hav¬
ing eyes for nothing save a future of brave new w-orlds . . . When we speak of Western
Civilization being carried to an Oriental country like Japan in recent generations, we
do not mean Graeco-Roman philosophy and humanist ideals, we do not mean the
Christianising of Japan, we mean the science, the modes of thought and alt that appa¬
ratus of civilisation which were beginning to change the face of the West in the latter

half of the seventeenth century-It was a civilisation that could cut itself away from

the Graeco-Roman heritage in general, away from Christianity itself—only too con¬
fident in its power to exist independent of anything of the kind. Wc know now that what
was emerging towards the end of the seventeenth centurv was a civilisation exhilaratingly
new perhaps, but strange as Nineveh and Babylon. That is why, since the rise of
Christianity, there is no landmark in history that is worthy to be compared with this.'
(Butterfield, H.: The Origins 0/ Modern Science, 1300-1S00 (London, 1949, Bell), pp.

7 Why wns^it that this secularized version of the Western culture had the corrosive effect
on the lives of assaulted societies to which Professor Butterfield draws attention in this
passage ? As the writer of this Study secs it, this corrosiveness was due not to the addition
of a new ingredient but to the excision of an old one. In breaking away from the religious
core of a fissile Western Civilization, this secular technological flake became a less un¬
inviting and at the same time a more deadly bait for any alien society to which it might
be proffered (see further, pp. e30-42, below). ,

• Sec IV. iv. 142-3, 150, 184. 2*7-8, *nd 643-5; V. v. 669-71; and V. vi. 316-17.

2 See pp. 514-21. below.

120 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
values would assuredly have produced some equivalent of the Petrine
Revolution in Russia, even if the personal genius of Peter the Great 1 had
not happened to make its dramatic epiphany on the imperial throne of
Muscovy at that historic moment.

The voluntary reception of a secularized form of the Western culture
by the Muscovite and Ottoman Orthodox Christians towards the close
of the seventeenth century was, however, only the harbinger of a move¬
ment in which the other non-Western societies of the Old World took
their time over following suit.

In the Islamic Society, for example, such trifling symptoms as a
Dutch-inspired passing craze for growing tulips during the chapter of
Ottoman history that had consequently won the name of 'the Tulip
Period’ (circa a.d. 1718-36), 2 and an Italian touch in the decoration of
mosques built in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era in Con¬
stantinople, were the only portents of Westernization until the shock of
defeat at the hands of a recently Westernized Orthodox Christian Power
in the Great Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74 inspired Sultan Selim
III (imperabat a.d. 1789-1807) to attempt the serious and controversial
enterprise of radically Westernizing the Ottoman military system. 3
Thus in Ottoman history the question of Westernization did not become
a live issue till the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the
Christian Era, and the failure of Sultan Selim’s first essay was followed
by nearly a century and a half of reluctant half-measures and disappoint¬
ing set-backs before the Ottoman Turkish people were moved, by the
supreme shock of defeat in the General War of a.d. 1914-18 and its
political and military aftermath, to commit themselves at long last to a
whole-hearted adoption of the Westernization policy as the manifest
only alternative to national extinction.

The Ottoman Turks who thus lagged so far behind their Serb and
Greek Orthodox Christian subjects in taking the path of Westernization
were, however, in the vanguard of the Muslim travellers along this
cultural road, and were abreast, if not ahead, of the pioneer Westernizers
in all other non-Western societies in the Old World with the one excep¬
tion of Orthodox Christendom. In the Hindu Society the Bengalis
began to open their minds to the reception of the Western Civilization
before the close of the eighteenth century as a result of their experience
of Western rule from a.d. 1757 onwards, but in this they were at least a
generation ahead of any other Hindu people, and the Westernization of
the Hindu Society as a whole did not set in until after the political
reunification of India under a Western raj in the course of the nineteenth
century. As for the Far Eastern Society, the reception of the Western
Civilization did not begin before the fifth decade of the nineteenth
century in China, and not before the sixth decade of the same century
in Japan. In the year a.d. 1952 the re-opening of Japan’s doors to the
West in a.d. 1854, after a lock-out that had lasted for 216 years (a.d.
1638-1854), was not yet a century old.

The relative lowness of these figures in the chronology of the living

1 Sec III. iii. 278-83. 1 See V. vi. 290.

J See III. iii. 48 *nd V. vi. 221.

A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 121

non-Wcstcrn civilizations’ encounters with the Modem West up to date
comes out when we turn to consider the chronology of the cultural
relations between a post-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization and its con¬
temporaries.

At the time of writing in the twentieth century of the Christian Era
this encounter between the World and Hellenism was manifestly long
since over, so that it was possible for the historian to follow the whole
story of it from beginning to end and to ascertain how long it had taken
for each of the divers consequences of the encounter to work itself out;
and, when the twentieth-century observer felt his way back into the past
in quest of the latest discernible cultural interactions between Hellenism
and other civilizations, he did not have to probe deeper than the twelfth
century of the Christian Era in order to strike the historical evidence for
which he was prospecting. In that century both the Far Eastern World
in the last days of the Northern Sung Dynasty in China and of 'the
Cloistered Emperors’ in Japan 1 and the Syriac World in the last days
of the successor-states of a foundered Umayyad Caliphate in Andalusia
and a foundered 'Abbasid Caliphate in South-Western Asia and Egypt
were still reacting to the impact of Hellenism with a vigour that leaves
no room for doubt. In the Far East in that age the visual arts were still
being inspired by the abiding influence of an Hellenic art which, travel¬
ling at the heels of an Alexander of Macedon and a Demetrius of Bactria,
had continued, long after these Hellenic conquerors’ empires had passed
away, to radiate into regions where the earth had never been shaken by
the tramp of the Phalanx; and in the Syriac World of the same age an
Hellenic philosophy and science that had come to maturity in the mind of
Alexander’s preceptor Aristotle were working in Oriental minds through
the medium of the Arabic language with a creatively stimulating effect
which Hellenism had never been able to exert, at this deep cultural
level, during a previous millennium of Hellenic military and political
domination 2 under which the minds of the Hellenic rulers’ non-
Hellenic subjects had been prejudiced against the reception of the
intellectual fruits of the Hellenic genius by a resentment at the presence
in their midst of an alien intruder who had thrust his civilization upon
them by force of arms.

Thus in the Syriac as well as in the Far Eastern World the influence
of Hellenism in the twelfth century of the Christian Era was still not
only vigorous but also fruitful; and this important last phase in the
history of the encounter between a post-Alexandrine Hellenism and
these two other civilizations was working itself out some fifteen hundred
years after Alexander’s crossing of the Hellespont in the year 334 b.c.
had inaugurated this episode in the story of Helleno-Syriac relations,
and some 1,350 years after Demetrius’s passage of the Hindu Kush in
183 B.c. had started a train of historical developments that had resulted
in the transit of Greek art, in the service of the Mahayana, from the

* bee IV. iv. 94 and V. vj. 303. . .

« The Time-span between Alexander’s conquest of the Achsemenian Empire in the
fourth century b.c. and the Primitive Muslim Arabs’ liquidation of Roman rule south
of the Taurus in the seventh century of the Christian Era.

122 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
banks of the Jumna to the banks of the Yellow River. To arrive at corres¬
ponding stages in the uncompleted histories of the encounters between
the Modern West and its living contemporaries, a twentieth-century
student of contacts between civilizations would have to cast forward
into the Future some 1,200 years beyond his own day, considering
that the history of a contact between the Modem West and Orthodox
Christendom, which had begun in the seventeenth century of the
Christian Era, would run into the thirty-second century if it were to
attain the Time-span of 1,500 years that had been the duration of
the encounter between Hellenism and the Syriac Civilization, while the
history of a contact between the Modern West and Japan which, in
the writer’s generation, was still less than a hundred years old, would
run into the same thirty-second century if it was to have the 1,350 years’
duration of the encounter between Hellenism and the Indie Civilization.

On the index of this Time-scale we can estimate the measure of a
twentieth-century observer’s inability to foresee the ultimate psycho¬
logical effects of the impacts of the Modern Western Civilization upon its
living contemporaries, when we consider how much of what this same
twentieth-century observer did know about the ultimate psychological
effects of the corresponding impacts of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism
would have been unknown to him if, instead of his being able to watch
the whole story unfolding itself over a Time-span of a minimum
length of 1,350 years and a maximum of 1,500, the accident of his
own position in the chronological series had confronted him with the
mental iron curtain of the human mind’s ignorance of the Future at a
date not much farther removed than two and a half centuries from the
beginning of this fiftecn-hundred-years-long tale.

If latter-day students of History had been thus compelled to confine
their historical vision of the impact of Hellenism within this narrow
chronological compass of one quarter of a millennium, then, in that
imaginary situation—as they could sec, in the light of the knowledge
which they actually commanded—not only the last phase but all other
really momentous incidents in the story would have been still lying
beyond their range of historical vision. On a range as short as 250 years
the beginning, as well as the end, of the influence of Hellenic philosophy
and science on Arabic philosophy and science, and of Hellenic art on
Chinese and Japanese art, would still have been hidden below their
historical horizon, and so would the final liquidation of Hellenic rule on
Syriac ground by Arab force of arms in the seventh century of the
Christian Era, which, as we have seen, was the psychologically requisite
prelude to a hearty reception of Greek thought in Arabic dress by Syriac
minds. On these thus imaginarily blinkered latter-day observers’ side of
the close confines of their field of vision, they would just have caught a
glimpse of the earliest violent Oriental reactions against an Hellenic
political domination—the infiltration of the Parni into Parthia in the
third century B.c.; the more militant anti-Hellenic insurrections in
Egypt and Judaea in the second century B.c.; and the subsequent collapse
of the Seleucid Power—without having been able to guess either that,
in the last century b.c., Rome was going to consolidate the political

A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 123

heritage of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies west of the Euphrates or
that, after Syria and Egypt had thus been retained under Hellenic
rule for a further 700 years as provinces of the Roman Empire,
Roman rule south of the Taurus would eventually be liquidated in its
turn by a feat of Arab arms as abruptly as the Achaemcnian Empire had
been liquidated by a feat of Macedonian arms at the inauguration of this
historical episode, a thousand years back.

More than that, these chronologically handicapped Western students
of History would have remained uninitiated into the most important of
all the consequences that the impact of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism
was to bring in its train; for they would have had hardly an inkling of the
religious response which, at the point in the story where an imaginary
mental iron curtain cut their vista off, the Orientals were about to make
to an Hellenic military challenge. What observer—Greek or Jew, Bar¬
barian, Scythian, bond or free 1 —could have guessed, if he had been
born into a Hellenizing World no later than 250 years after Alexander’s
passage of the Hellespont, that the intellectual influence of Hellenic
thought on Oriental minds was to be long anticipated in date, and
utterly eclipsed in importance as measured by its effect on the terrestrial
destiny of Mankind, by a spiritual influence of Oriental religion on
Hellenic souls? How could any observer have foreseen, from so prema¬
ture a chronological station, that there would be, not only a change of
plane, from the political to the cultural level, and a change of ethos,
from violence to gentleness, in the encounter between the Hellenes and
their Oriental victims, but also a reversal in the roles of the actors—a
reversal in which the initiative would pass from the Hellenic to the
Oriental side ?

This turning of the tables in the subsequent history of the relations
between victors who had won their battle, and vanquished who had lost
theirs, on the material plane of physical force was a more marvellous
victory than any ever won by an Alexander of Macedon or a Demetrius
of Bactria or a S'ad b. abi Waqqas or an 'Amr b. al-'As, just because it
was not gained over adversaries in a counter-offensive, stimulated by a
thirst for a revanche , after the pattern of the 'holy war’ in which Amosis
expelled the Hyksos from the Delta or the Ming the Mongols from
China-within-the-Wall. The Oriental evangelists of the higher religions
succeeded in taking their Hellenic military conquerors spiritually captive
because they approached them, not with animus, as enemies to be
overthrown, but with love, as souls to be saved. Alexander of Macedon’s
military conquest of the Achaemcnian Empire and Demetrius of
Bactria’s pounce upon the Maurya Raj received this rejoinder in a
language that ignored the argument of the sword when Kanishka was
converted to the Mahayana some two and a half centuries after Deme¬
trius’s military exploit, and Constantine to Christianity some six and a
half centuries after Alexander's similar triumph over Darius. To trans¬
late the story from personal into institutional terms, we may say that the
Catholic MahSyana was the Indie Society’s reply to the Bactrian Greek
and Kushan empires, and the Catholic Christian Church the Syriac

» Col. iii. n.

124 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Society’s reply to the Seleucid and Roman empires. These universal
churches were the new works of creation that were generated by the
impacts of Hellenism on the Indie and Syriac worlds; and the average
of the lengths of time that the peripeteia took to work itself out from
Demetrius's day to Kanishka's and from Alexander’s to Constantine’s
was, as will be noticed, just about twice as long as the longest contact, up
to date, between the Modem West and any of its living contemporaries.

The course of the past and therefore known encounters between a
post-Alcxandrine Hellenism and its Syriac and Indie sisters did not
warrant any presumption that the still untransacted future passages in
the encounters of the Modem West with other living civili2ations would
follow the same course or anything like it. There were, however, two
expectations which this historical parallel might perhaps legitimately
suggest. The first was that the two hundred and fifty years during which
the Modern West had been making its impact, up to date, on Orthodox
Christendom were likely to prove in retrospect to be a small instalment
of the whole story by comparison with the length of the instalments
which, at that date, were still due to follow. The second legitimate
expectation, in the light of the Hellenic precedent, was that, however
widely the denouement of the play in which the Modern West was the
protagonist might differ from that of the Hellenic drama in substance,
it was likely at least to resemble it in the subjective point of being an
outcome that would have been utterly surprising to a spectator whose
ticket had actually admitted him to witness the performance of only the
first act. The astonishment that a miraculous ’pre-view’ of the dramatic
situation in the thirty-second century would have produced in the mind
of a twentieth-century observer of an historical drama entitled ‘the World
and the West’ might be augured by imagining what the feelings of the
Hellenic philosopher-historian Poscidonius of Apamea (vivebat circa
135-51 b.c.) would have been if he could have foreseen the state of the
relations between the Syriac Civilization and Hellenism in the succes¬
sive generations of Constantine (imperabat a.d. 306-337), Mu'Swiyah
(imperabat a.d. 661-6S0), and Avicenna (vivebat a.d. 980-1037).

On this showing, a twentieth-century student of human affairs might
expect to find the history of the encounters between the Modern West
and its contemporaries comparatively unilluminating, for the same
reason that had condemned the domestic history of the Western Civili¬
zation to be comparatively unilluminating for a study of the species of
societies of which it was one representative. 1 An imperfect specimen is
manifestly not the best choice for the purposes of scientific observation
and research; and, in the science of human affairs, there is this blemish
of imperfection in any historical episode in which less than the whole
story is within the historian’s knowledge. Thus, while twentieth-century
Western students of History might hope that the set of encounters in
which the Modern West had been the hero—or the villain—might offer
them a convenient starting-point for a survey of episodes of this category,
they could not count on this still unfinished story’s proving equally
serviceable to them thereafter in the subsequent stages of their inquiry.

* See I. j. 36-37.

A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 125

When we pass on from a preliminary attempt to assemble the relevant
facts to our ulterior enterprise of trying to interpret them, our standby
will prove to be the parallel set of encounters between a post-Alcxandrine
Hellenic Civilization and its contemporaries in which a twentieth-
century student did know the whole story as it had unfolded itself, from
beginning to end, over periods of time of a vastly greater order of magni¬
tude than 250, or even 450, years.

The Time-span of fifteen hundred years over which the history of
the Helleno-Syriac encounter extends, from the Hellenic conquest of the
Achaemenian Empire by Alexander the Great to the Syriac reception of
Greek thought in Arabic dress, will be shown by our survey to be a per¬
formance of unusual length; but we shall be able to draw upon the
histories of other encounters which, though considerably shorter than
that, had nevertheless likewise been illuminatingly longer than the
encounters between the West and other living civilizations up to date.
The encounter between the Syriac and Babylonic civilizations, for
example, occupied some nine or ten centuries if we reckon that it began
with Asshurnazirpal’s assault on Syria in 876 B.c. 1 and ended with
the absorption of the mortal remains of the Babylonic Society into the
still living tissues of the Syriac body social 2 in the first century of the
Christian Era. 3 Again, the encounter between a Medieval Western
Christendom, an Eastern Orthodox Christendom, and the Syriac World
occupied some seven or eight centuries if we date its beginning in the
eleventh century of the Christian Era, when the Western Christendom
launched a general offensive against its two neighbours on a front ex¬
tending from Compostella to Edessa, and date its end at a.d. 1797,
when the liquidation of the Venetian regime in the Ionian Islands liber¬
ated tire last remnant of a subject Orthodox Christian population from
the domination of the Medieval Western Crusaders’ Italian successors. 4

The social and psychological phenomena arising from these relatively
long-drawn-out encounters will illuminate our study in later divisions
of this Part. Our first task, however, is to carry out the operation of
surveying the facts on the plan which we have now worked out.

See IV. iv. 473, n. 3

5 Sec I. i. 79-80 and 1x9; II. ii. £38^ IV. >Y-. 47 1 1 v - Y:

v. 04, X22— 3, and 370.

N.J., in June 1952, the writer

> At the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, . . . .» .

learnt from Professor O. Neugebaucr that the scries of cuneiform documents disinterred
in Babylonia by Modern Western archaeologists, which had formerly included no
documents of any dace later than the last century b.c., had now been extended chrono¬
logically by a recent discovery of documents of the first century of the Christian Era.

* See p. 115, n. 4, above. The terminal date would be, not a.d. 1797, but a.d. 1945.
if, in view of the implication of the Russian branch of Orthodox Christendom, as well
as the main body, in the medieval encounter between an Orthodox Christendom and
her Western sister, we were to reckon the episode as still not being closed so long as,
on the continental front between a Russian Orthodox Christendom and the Western
World, a remnant of Orthodox or ex-Orthodox Uniatc Ukrainians and White Russians
still remained under Polish rule. In the following survey, however, the encounter
between the Medieval Western Christendom and the Russian offshoot of an Eastern
Orthodox Christendom is dealt with as a separate episode from the Medieval Western
Christendom’s encounter with the main body of its Orthodox Christian sister society.

126 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

(II) OPERATIONS ACCORDING TO PLAN

(a) ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MODERN WESTERN CIVILIZATION

i. The Modem West and Russia.'

Russia's * Western Question’

If the opening of the ‘modern’ chapter of Western history is to be
dated at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian
Era, 2 and the establishment of a Russian Orthodox Christian universal
state in the eighth decade of the fifteenth century—which saw the politi¬
cal unification of Russian Orthodox Christendom through the incorpora¬
tion of the Republic of Novgorod into the Grand Duchy of Muscovy 1 —
this outstanding political event in the history of the Orthodox Christian
Society in Russia just anticipated the impact on Russia of the Western
Civilization in its ‘modern’ form, and the subsequent chapter in the
history of Russia’s ‘Western Question’ was all transacted while Russia
was in her universal state phase.

This ‘Western Question’ was already familiar to Russian minds in an
older shape; for Russia’s encounter with the West in and after the six¬
teenth century was not her first contact with her Western neighbour and
sister. A previous contact, in the Medieval Age of Western history,
which is examined separately below, 4 had resulted, in the course of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the Christian Era, in the establish¬
ment of Western Christian Polish and Lithuanian rule over large
stretches of the original patrimony of Russian Orthodox Christendom,
including, besides the entire domains of the White Russian and Ukrain¬
ian peoples, a western fringe of Great Russian territory round Smolensk ; s
and the Moscow which, at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centur¬
ies, had recently become the capital of a Russian universal state had
come, before that, to be the frontier fortress of an independent remnant
of Russian Orthodox Christendom against a Western Christendom
which had made those sweeping encroachments on her sister society’s
ground. This previous encounter of Russia’s with a Medieval Western
Christendom had an aftermath in the history of Russia’s subsequent
relations with the Modem West.

In the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries
the Western Civilization’s hold over the Russian populations in Poland-
Lithuania was strengthened by the cumulative cultural consequences of
the political union of the Kingdom of Lithuania with the Kingdom of
Poland, which was consummated in a.d. 1569, 6 and the ecclesiastical
union of a large part of the Russian Orthodox Christian community in
Poland-Lithuania with the Roman Catholic Church, which took place
in a.d. 1594-6. In the detached fragment of a Russian Orthodox
Christendom that was thus clamped on to the Western World by these
two institutional bonds, the Western culture, in a Polish dilution of its

• See xi, maps 40 and 65. * See

J See IV. iv. 88; V. v. 3:2; and VI. vii. 32, with

ment in n. 2.

5 Sec II. ii. 172 and 175-6.

a. 114-16, above,
rince D. Obolensky's com-
On pp. 356-7 and pp. 398-403, below.

* See II. ii. 175.

THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 127

modern distillation, succeeded—largely thanks to the missionary activi¬
ties of the Jesuits—in captivating the local land-owning aristocracy
which had originally been Ukrainian, White Russian, or Lithuanian in
nationality and Orthodox Christian or pagan in religion. While the
cx-Orthodox peasantry who came under the ecclesiastical supremacy
of the Papacy as a result of the ecclesiastical union of A.D. 1594-6 became
members of a Uniate church which was allowed to retain most of its
traditional rites and discipline, many members of the ex-Orthodox
nobility travelled the whole length of the ecclesiastical road to Westerni¬
zation by becoming Roman Catholics of the Latin Rite.

At the same time the political sovereignty over ex-Russian territories
in which the Modern Western Civilization was gaining these converts
was one of the stakes in a fluctuating military contest between a Russian
universal state and a succession of Continental European Western
Powers. In another conncxionit has already been pointed out 1 that, at
the moment when an ownerless East Roman Imperial mantle was falling
about a Muscovite Grand Duke’s shoulders as a consequence of the
capture of Constantinople by the ‘Osmanlis in a.d. 1453, the Russian
recipients of this ideological legacy from ‘the Second Rome’ were so
exactingly preoccupied with the immediate task of arresting the advance
of a Western aggressor who was already at their gates, and with the
ulterior aspiration of eventually liberating the adjacent Russian Ortho¬
dox Christian populations which had fallen under a Western domination,
that they were deaf to sly Western suggestions that they should assert
their title to their East Roman Imperial heritage by challenging an
Ottoman domination over non-Russian Orthodox Christian peoples 2
who were sundered from Muscovy by the double barrier of the Eurasian
Steppe 3 and the Black Sea. Meanwhile, at the western approaches to

1 See the citation from Obolensky and the quotation from Sumner in VI. vii. 37,
n. 1.

3 On the agenda of Muscovite statesmen the first business was to challenge the West¬
ern domination over Russian Orthodox Christians in White Russia and the Ukraine.
An undertaking to abstain from any form of oppression of Orthodox Christians under
Lithuanian and Polish rule was obtained from Poland-Lithusnia by Muscovy in a.d,
1686 and was followed un by active Muscovite intervention on those Orthodox Christ¬
ians’ behalf in a.d. 1718-25 (see Sumner, B. H.: Peler the Great and the Ottoman
Empire (Oxford 1949, Blackwell), pp. 32-33; eundem: Peter the Great and the Emergence
of Rustia (London 1950, English Universities Press), np. 181 and 183). A corresponding
undertaking from the Ottoman Porte was sought by Muscovite diplomacy at Carlowitx
in a.d. 1698-9 and at Constantinople in a.d. 1690-1700 (see eundem, Peter the Great
and the Ottoman Empire. p. 32), but in this field the objective was not attained till a.d.
1774. The first manifesto in which Russia declared herself the champion of the Ottoman
Christians and called upon them to take up arms in a common struggle against the
'Osmanlis was Peter the Great’s proclamation of March 17x1 (see ibid., p. 46), and
Peter’s ill-starred invasion of Moldavia in the same year waa the first appearance of a
Russian army within the confines of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom. On this occa¬
sion 'a Russian army entered Moldavia and Russian cavalry watered their horses in the
Danube ... for the first time for more than seven centuries’ (ibid., p. 30). In A.D. 969-
72, when the pagan Russian war-lord Svyatoslav had passed that way, the valley of the
Pruth had not yet been co!oni2ed by an Orthodox Christian population.

J Sumner points out (in op. cit., pp. 14. 27. »nd 79 ) 'bat, so long as the Great Western
Bay of the Eurasian Steppe remained a Nomad’s land, regular armies could not operate
across it without risk of disaster, though it was a highly conductive medium for raids
by the Crimean Tatar horse (sec ibid., p. 15, n. 3). Galitsin’s two attempts, in A.D. 1697
and a.d. 1699, to invade the Crimea across the Steppe ended as unsuccessfully (see ibid.,
p. 15) as the Ottoman attempt in a.d. 1569 to seize and hold the Don-Volga portage
(see the present Study, II. ii. 445, and pp. 225-7, below). When Peter the Great invaded

128 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

Moscow, the ‘irrepressible conflict’ between Muscovy and the West over
the allegiance of White Russia and the Ukraine went on for some five
hundred years, reckoning from the middle of the fifteenth century,
which saw the high tide of Lithuania’s expansion at the Russian
Orthodox Christendom’s expense, 1 down to the close of the General
War of a.d. 1939-45, when the annexation of Eastern Galicia to the
Soviet Union brought back under Russian rule the last still unrecaptured
residue of the Russian Orthodox Christian territories that had been
conquered for the West in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by
Polish and Lithuanian arms. 2

Channels of Western Cultural Radiation into Russia.

The military and political victory which Russia thus eventually
obtained over the West on this Continental European front was offset
on the cultural plane by the consequent propagation of Modern
Western influences from these semi-Westernizcd tracts of originally
Russian ground into a Muscovy which had exposed herself to this
Western cultural contamination by wresting one after another of the
infected territories out of the hands of their Western conquerors and
uniting them politically with a Muscovite citadel of Russian Orthodox
Christendom which had never fallen under Western rule. The most
important single event in this long-drawn-out process was Muscovy’s
acquisition, in a.d. 1667, 3 of Kiev, the Ukrainian city which had been a
pre-Muscovite Russia’s political and cultural capital, and which, under
Polish rule, had latterly become a powerful transmitting-station for
Western cultural influences. Under a Polono-Jesuit dispensation at
Kiev, even the Orthodox Christian clergy who had rejected the ecclesias¬
tical union of a.d. 1594-6 had nevertheless been deeply affected by the
culture and ethos of a Tridentine Roman Church; and, after the transfer
of Kiev from Polish to Muscovite sovereignty, Peter the Great found

Moldavia in a.d. 1711, he marched, not via the direct route across the Steppe, but via
a roundabout route through the Polish Ukraine; and in A.D. 1739 Munich followed the
same roundabout route with success, after having been foiled in a.d. 1738 in an attempt
to invade Moldavia by the steppe-route (see Sumner, op. cit., p. 39, n. 3). The Steppe
remained an obstacle to regular military operations until it had been colonized by a
sedentary agricultural population, and this colonization did not begin till the plantation,
in a.d. 1754. of a 'New Serbia' between the Dnicpr and the Bug, and did not get under
way, full swing, till after the Russo-Turkish peace-settlement of a.d. 1774.

* See II. ii. 172 and 175-6.

* After the War of a.d. 1939-45 the Soviet Union completed the political unification,
within her frontiers, of the entire geographical domain of the Ukrainian people by further
acquiring Carpatho-Ruthcnia: a territory, adjoining Eastern Galicia and likewise in¬
habited oy Ukrainians, which had been attached to Czechoslovakia since the peace
settlement after the War of a.d. 1914-18, and to Hungary before that. These Trans-
carpathian Ukrainians were sundered from the main body of their nation by the barrier
of the mountains, and there was no evidence that Carpatho-Ruthcnia had ever been
associated politically with the rest of the Ukraine in any previous chapter of Ukrainian
history.

3 In the Muscovite-Polish Peace Treaty of Andrusovo, concluded in a.d. 1667, it was
agreed that Kiev, which was at that moment in Muscovite hands, should remain under
Muscovite occupation for two years longer, notwithstanding the fact that the city lay
on the west bank of the River Dniepr, which, by the terms of the Treaty, was to be the
permanent frontier between the two contracting parties. The Muscovites, however, did
not ever evacuate Kiev, and Poland renounced her claim to it in a.d. 1686 (sec Allen,
W. E. D.: The Ukraine, A History (Cambridge 1940, University Press), pp. 158 and 176).

THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 129

pliant instruments among this Western-minded Kievan Orthodox
clergy' for carrying through the measures 2 by which he succeeded in
bringing a less tractable Muscovite Orthodox Church into line with his
own Westernizing policy.

This originally Russian but latterly semi-Westcrnized debatable
territory on the continental .borderland between Muscovy and the
Western World had not, however, been the principal field in which the
encounter between Russia and the Western Civilization in its modern
form had been taking place down to the time of writing on the morrow
of the General War of a.d. 1939-45. F° r one thing, the Polish reflexion of
the Modern Western culture was too dim—even when the rustic mirror
had been polished up by skilful and assiduous Jesuit hands—to impress
itself deeply on Muscovite Russian souls after the political annexation of
this border to an expanding Muscovite Empire; and, when the process of
Muscovite political expansion overland towards the West had gone on
to embrace East European territories whose culture was completely
Western in origin, the cultural effect of this political association had
likewise been slight. During the hundred years (a.d. 1815-1915) for
which 'Congress Poland’, for example, had been linked politically with
‘All the Russias’ under the sovereignty of the Romanovs, Warsaw had
exerted little more cultural influence on Moscow and St. Petersburg
than Moscow and St. Petersburg had exerted during the same years on
Warsaw. 1 In the crucial encounter between Russia and the Modern
West the principals on the Western side had never, so far, been the
relatively backward representatives of the Modern Western Civiliza¬
tion who were Russia’s immediate continental neighbours in Eastern
Europe; they had been those maritime peoples on the European shores
of the Atlantic who, at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
had taken over from the North Italians the leadership of the Western
World and had initiated its successive enterprises in the modern chapter
of its history.

This latterly dominant group of maritime Western countries had
come to include not only those in Western Europe, but also Russia’s
immediate maritime neighbours along the east coast of the Baltic, from
Courland to Finland inclusive, who all came under Russian sovereignty
in the course of the eighteenth century; but, though, from the time of
Peter the Great down to the Russian Communist Revolution of a.d.
1917, the German barons and bourgeoisie of the Baltic provinces exer¬
cised an influence on Russian life which was out of proportion to their
numbers, the influence of the West European peoples counted for much
more, and this influence did not merely filter into Russia through Kiev

> See Platonov, S.: Hisioire de la Russit da Origines d 1918 (Pari* 1929. Payot), pp.
648-50. Cp. Kliutschcwskij, W. (K!uchev*kii, V.J: Geichichtt Rutslandt (Berlin 1925-6,
Obelisk-Vcrlag, 4 vote.), vol. iv, p. 175.

i See III. iti. 283, n. 2.

1 Thi* nineteenth-century experience threw some light on the cultural prospect* of
n latter-day political situation in which the western limits of Russia’s political ascen¬
dancy, after having receded, between the First and the Second World War, to the line
along which it had run in the years A.D. 179J-5. stood once again on native Western
ground—and this time as far westward as a line running from a westerly point on the
southern shore of the Baltic Sea to an easterly point on the northern flank of the Austrian
Alps (see p. 142, n. 6, below).

B 2388 .vm

130 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
and Riga; it was also conveyed direct through ports of entry which the
Russian Imperial Government deliberately opened to receive it.

The earliest of these Russian water-gates for the direct reception of
the Modern Western Civilization was the mouth of the Northern
Dvina on the coast of the White Sea, which was reached by an English
ship in a.d. 1553, some eleven years after the first Portuguese landfall
on the coast of Japan. 1 The Muscovite Government responded by found¬
ing the port-town of Archangel there in a.d. 1584, and the Westerners
who entered Russia by this route established an inland outpost in 'the
Sloboda' 1 on the threshold of Moscow. The direct intercourse between
Western Europe and Russia via the White Sea was thus inaugurated on
the initiative of the West European mariners in the course of their
sixteenth-century conquest of the Ocean, but the intensity of the in¬
fluence of the Modern Western Civilization on Russia was keyed up to a
higher pitch when, in the opening years of the eighteenth century, the
circuitous maritime route between Russia and Western Europe via
Archangel was short-circuited, on Russian initiative, by the foundation
of St. Petersburg, 3 and when the field within which this alien influence
was allowed to exert itself in the interior of the Russian World was
simultaneously expanded from the narrow limits of 'the Sloboda’ to
embrace the entire domain of an empire which, in Peter’s day, already
stretched all the way from the Baltic to the Pacific.

Alternative Russian Responses to the Challenge of Western Technology
In an intercourse between Russia and the Modern West which, by
the time of writing, had been active for some 250 years at this high pitch
of intensity, and, in a lower key, for some two hundred years before
that, the plot of the drama was dictated by a perpetual interplay between
the demonic technological prowess of the Modern Western World and
a no less demonic determination in Russian souls to preserve Russia’s
independence against all comers. The Russians had their hearts thus
set on the independence of their society because their minds were
convinced of the uniqueness of Russia’s destiny; and this Russian con¬
viction was something more than the common egocentric illusion that
afflicts all societies and individuals in some degree. 4 The Russians'

E liar sense of destiny had found expression, as we have seen, 5 in a
f that the mantle of Constantinople had fallen on Moscow’s
shoulders; and the pretensions of Constantinople—'the Second Rome’
—had been greater than those of Rome herself; for the pagan Roman
Empire had believed in itself merely on the matter-of-fact mundane
ground that Rome had been the ultimate victor in a competition be-

* The first English landfall on the White Sea coast of Russia and the first Portuguese
landfall on the coast of Japan were, both alike, unintentional achievements of ships that
had been driven out of their course by bad weather.

1 This Western Christian equivalent of a ghetto in pre-Petrine Muscovy has been
noticed in II. ii. 230-2 and II f. iii. 280-2. ‘By the time of Peter’s boyhood there may
have been some three thousand foreigners in all in Muscovy—almost entirely Protes¬
tant/—Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence 0} Russia (London 1950,
English Universities Press), p. 12.

’ See II. ii. 157-8; V. vi. 343; and VI. vii. 221-2.

4 For this illusion, see I. i. 157-64.

i In VI. vii. 31-40.

THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 131

tween the Great Powers of a post-Alexandrine Hellenic World for
providing a disintegrating society with a universal state, whereas the
Christian Roman Empire had fortified its Roman self-confidence with
the transcendental Christian faith that the Orthodox Church had in¬
herited from Jewry the spiritual privilege of being God’s ‘Chosen
People’.

Moscow’s assumption of the role of a unique repository and citadel of
Orthodoxy had been a cumulative process, beginning with the consolida¬
tion of an effective political power through the political unification of a
still independent remnant of Russian Orthodox Christendom in the
eighth decade of the fifteenth century 1 and culminating in the acquisi¬
tion of an imposing ecclesiastical authority through the establishment of
an autocephalous Patriarchate of Moscow in a.d. 1589;* and this cen¬
tury-, which saw Muscovy thus fortified and consecrated, was also the
century that saw the Muscovite remnant of Russian independence, in a
domain already much reduced by Medieval Western encroachments,
threatened more seriously than ever before by a Modern Western
World armed with an unprecedented and unrivalled technological
equipment. An impregnable Muscovite self-assurance thus found itself
assailed by an irresistible Western material force, and this uncanny
encounter presented to Russian souls a challenge to which they made
three diverse responses.

One Russian response was a totalitarian ‘Zealot’ reaction which found
its typical exponents in ‘the Old Believers’. These fanatics broke with
the official Muscovite Church and State over the question whether the
traditional Muscovite version of Orthodox Christian ritual and discipline
should or should not be brought into line with seventeenth-century
Greek practice. 3 They obstinately refused to change one jot or tittle of
their own parochial Muscovite custom; and the intransigence thus dis¬
played in a family quarrel within the bosom of the Orthodox Church
declared itself, a fortiori, against a policy of adopting anything at all
from a schismatic Western World. 4 They were unwilling to adopt even
a Western technolog}' in which the faint virus of a Western spiritual
tradition was certified, on the Western exporters’ label, to have been
thoroughly sterilized. ‘The Old Believers’ would not harbour this
professedly innocuous alien technology even for the laudable purpose of
safeguarding Holy Russia’s independence by fighting a formidable
assailant with his own lethal weapons.

This totalitarian ‘Zealot’ reaction in Russia to the pressure of a Modern
Western World was as sincere as it was logical. Trusting, as they did,
wholly in God and not in Man, the Russian ‘Zealots’ were willing to
stake the existence of their Russian Orthodox Christendom on their
belief that God would faithfully save His people so long as they loyally
kept His law; but they never came within sight of winning the power to
put their belief to a practical test; for they remained an impotent
minority which, when the moment came for action, was always

« See VI. vii. if. * See VI. vii. 34 - 35 - s See VI. vii. 36-38.

♦ See Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence of Rusiia (London 1950,
English Universities Press), p. 17 -

i 3 2 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

brushed aside—not because the majority did not share the ‘Zealots’ ’ zeal
for Russia’s independence, but because they did not believe that their
common aim could be attained solely through faith without works. The
making of Russia’s policy towards the Modern West never came into
the ‘Zealots’ ’ hands; yet, though their reaction was repressed, it was not
without effect as a subterranean influence when the exponents of an
alternative policy were in the saddle. For example, 'the Slavophil
Movement’ which was one of the nineteenth-century cultural phenomena
of the ‘Herodian’ Petrine regime, and which could be explained, in these
‘Herodian’ terms, as a Russian variation on the contemporary Romantic
Movement in the West, revealed itself at the same time, from another
standpoint, as being a muted expression of the native Russian ‘Zealot’
hostility to the Western culture—a hostility which, in an age when a
Westernizing tendency was in the ascendant in Russia, found itself
compelled to masquerade in some Western garb or other, 1 and therefore
fastened upon an archaizing Western movement which was a native
Western criticism of a latter-day industrial Western way of life. 2

The thorough-going ‘Herodianism’ which was at the opposite extreme
of the psychological gamut from the totalitarian ‘Zealotism’ of ‘the Old
Believers’ was first translated from aspiration into act by the genius of
the Russian ‘Zealots’ ’ bugbear Peter the Great. 1 The Petrine policy was
to convert the Russian Empire from a Russian Orthodox Christian
universal state into one of the parochial states of a Modern Western
World, in which the Russian people was to take its place as one among
a number of Western and Westernized nations. This policy sought to
save Russia’s political independence and cultural autonomy, in a world
in which the Modern Western way of life was the rule, by gaining admis¬
sion for Russia to membership in a Westerners’ club in which eighteenth-
century enlightened monarchs did not carry their indulgence in 'the
sport of kings' beyond the point of exercising their forces ‘by temperate and
undecisive contests’. 4 The modesty and practicality of these aims, which
were the objective merits of the policy, were also, however, its inherent
subjective weaknesses; for, from the Russian standpoint, the Petrine
policy could be denounced as a pursuit of certain means towards Russian
ends at the cost of sacrificing the very ends which these means pre¬
supposed, and in virtue of which alone they were of any value or sig-

1 See VI. vii. 38-39.

1 For this aspect of the Modern Western Romantic Movement, see V. vi. 60.

3 Sumner points out that one of the evidences of Peter’s genius, and secrets of his
success, is to be found in the fact that, in his Westernizing reforms, he was giving prac¬
tical effect to a Westernizing tendency which was already in the air in Muscovy by the
time when he came into power. ‘The greatness of Peter lies in the fact that to a large
extent he gave shape to needs and aspirations growing within Muscovite Society of
the late seventeenth century’ (Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (London 1950,
English Universities Press), p. 3). Peter's father Alexis (imperabat a.d. 1645-76) had
already gone far enough in this direction to be branded by 'the Old Believers’ as Anti¬
christ (sec ibid., p. 19) before he was relieved of this invidious identification by the
transfer of the epithet to his still more objectionable son (see ibid., p. 66, and the present
Study, III. iii. 281). ‘It is tragically ironic that [Prince V. v. Galitsin, one of the principal
ministers of Peter's half-sister Sophia during her regency (eurrebat a.d. 1682-9)], whose
ideas were so close to Peter's, had no share whatever in carrying into effect Peter's
reforms’ (ibid., p. 26).

* Gibbon. E. : The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, xxxviii,
ad fin., quoted in IV. iv. 148.

THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 133

nificance in Russian eyes. In acquiescing in the Petrine policy the
Russians were, in fact, resigning themselves to being, after all, 'like all
the nations’, 1 and were implicitly renouncing Moscow’s pretension to
the unique destiny of being the citadel of Orthodoxy: the one society in the
World that was pregnant with the future hopes of Mankind. This impli¬
cation did not prevent Peter’s policy from being tried in Russia—and
this over a period of more than two hundred years—but it did prevent it
from ever winning the Russian people’s wholehearted support; and the
long-suppressed insistence on the uniqueness of Russia’s destiny re¬
asserted itself in a Communist Russian reaction to the Modern West
which found its opportunity in the Petrine reaction’s failure.

Russian Communism was an attempt to reconcile this irrepressible
Russian sense of destiny with the ineluctable necessity of coping with
the Modern West’s technological prowess if Russia was to have any
destiny at all. 2 The Communist solution for Russia’s perennial ‘Western
Question’ was to harness the horse-power of the West’s redoubtable
technique to the chariot of Russia’s incomparable destiny, instead of
either subordinating Russia’s destiny, as the ‘Hcrodians’ were ready to
subordinate it, to the exigencies of Westernization, or leaving it, as the
‘Zealots’ were ready to leave it, in the hands of God; and, of all the three
Russian answers to ‘the Western Question’, this was the only one that
appeared to offer any chance of reconciling Russian faith with Western
facts. This Russian Communist policy was, however, based on an im¬
plicit assumption that it was practically possible to appropriate one
clement in an alien culture without having to adopt the rest of it, and
this postulate that a culture is not indivisible remained to be proved. 3
Meanwhile, it was impugned by the significant fact that, in making this
very assumption, the Russian Communists were already following a
Western lead. Their belief that cultural and political phenomena could
all be reduced to economic terms, and that economic facts alone were
realities and not illusions, was taken by them on faith from the Western
philosopher-prophet Karl Marx; and, in seeking to rationalize the
content of the Modern Western Civilization by discarding the element
of liberal idealism and retaining nothing but an economic materialism,
Marx had only been going one step farther along a road on which his
liberal predecessors had entered when, in a revulsion from the Western
Wars of Religion, they had sought to jettison the religious element in
the Western tradition, while still retaining a secularized liberalism as an
idealistic counter-weight to a banausic technology.

The adoption of a Western ideology of any kind was indeed a para¬
doxical way of reasserting, against the Modern Western World, Russia’s
pretension to be the heir to a unique destiny; and this paradox was a
striking testimony to the strength—frankly recognized in the Petrine
‘Hcrodian’ movement—of a current, carrying Russia in a Western direc¬
tion, which had not ceased to make its flow felt beneath the surface

1 1 Sam. viii. 5 and 20.

1 In virtue of thus striving to reconcile two conflicting exigencies which were both
imperious, Russian Communism had in it an intrinsic ambivalence which is examined
further on pp. 607-8, below.

J This question is discussed on pp. 542-64, below.

i 3 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
when the Petrine regime had been discredited and liquidated. The sub¬
stitution of a Marxian ideology derived from the West for an Orthodox
Christianity derived from Byzantium, as the true faith of which Russia
was the hallowed repository, was a paradox that was at the same time an
inevitable corollary of the militant reaction towards Western pressure
for which Russian Communism stood.

Lenin and his successors divined that a policy of fighting the West
with its own weapons could not hope to succeed if the weapons in

Q uestion were conceived of in exclusively material terms; for, while
'echnology was the spear-head of the Modern West’s assault on the rest of
the contemporary world, the assailants might not have penetrated farther
than the outer defences of their neighbours’ castles if they had delivered
their attack with material weapons alone. The secret of the Modern
Western Civilization’s amazing success in propagating itself to the ends of
the Earth during the last 250 years before the Russian Communist Revo¬
lution of a.d. 1917 had lain in a masterly co-operation of the spiritual with
the temporal arm. The breaches blown by the blast of a Modern
Western technology had opened a passage for the spirit of a Modern
Western Liberalism; and the voluntary capitulation of alien souls,
imprimis Peter the Great’s, to the charm of the Modern Western secular
culture had done more to make its fortune in the World than all the
military conquests of a Cortds, Pizarro, Clive, or Wellesley. The latter-
day leaders of the militant Russian reaction against the West well under¬
stood that, if Russia was to reassert against the West her own claim to be
the child of Destiny, it would not be enough for her to make herself the
equal of the West in the mastery of the contemporary Western technique;
she must also be the champion of a faith that could contend on equal
terms with a Modern Western Liberalism; and she must not be content
simply to preserve in its pristine purity, within a Holy Russian citadel,
the distinctive faith to which she was to dedicate herself; she must enter
into active competition with the Western faith of Liberalism in that
literally world-wide mission-field which the Modern West had created by
knitting together the whole habitable and traversable surface of the
Earth in a Western-manufactured net-work of communications and
commerce. Russia must compete with the West for the spiritual allegiance
of all the living societies that were neither Western nor Russian in their
native cultural tradition, and—not content even with that—she must
have the supreme audacity to carry the war into the enemy’s camp by
preaching the Russian faith in the West’s own homeland.

Granting the necessity of the strategy outlined in these general terms
for a Russia who was bent on reasserting herself, the particular faith to
which a spiritually militant Russia was to attempt to convert the World
still remained to be found, and this was the point at which the ascendancy
of the Modern Western culture in the contemporary world revealed its
strength by driving the Russians into the paradoxical course on which,
after Lenin’s death, the policy of the Soviet Union was set in conse¬
quence of Stalin’s victory over Trotsky. Stalin’s appropriation of the
international flag of Marxism to serve as a new banner for Russian
nationalism was a paradox because it was as illogical as it was statesman-

THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 135

like. In logic the question was not an open one at all. The one faith that
a militant Russia could logically pit against a Modern Western Liberal¬
ism was the traditional Russian version of Orthodox Christianity, since
Russia’s claim to be the sole surviving repository of a perfect Christian
Orthodoxy constituted her title to be ‘the Third Rome’ who was ‘the
Heir of the Promise’. To throw over Orthodox Christianity was to throw
away the credentials on which the whole of her pretension to uniqueness
rested. Mated with any faith other than this traditional one—and,
above all, when the substituted novel faith was a creed whose ‘chosen
People’ was, not the Russian nation, but an international proletariat—
the pretension was deprived of even that shadow of historical justification
with which it was covered in the setting of its original associations. On
the other hand the idea that Russia should attempt to compete for the
spiritual allegiance of Mankind against a Modern Western Liberalism
in the name of a traditional Orthodox Christianity had only to be
formulated in order to put itself out of court by the glaring obviousness
of its impracticability. Manifestly that cock would not fight in a twentieth-
century oecumenical cockpit. By that date the World was already so far
Westernized that the one hope of challenging the prevailing liberal
Western ideological orthodoxy lay in pitting against it an ideological
heresy that was likewise of Western origin; and for this militant Russian
purpose the Marxian ideology was particularly well suited 1 in nvo ways.

In the first place Marxism was a Western ‘futurist’ criticism of a
latter-day industrial form of Modern Western life which the Western
Romantic Movement had attacked from an ‘archaistic’ angle; 1 and a
Wenticth-ccntury Russian Communist adaptation of this Western vein
of Futurism promised to be a more effective move than a nineteenth-
century Russian Slavophil adaptation of Romanticism had proved to be,
since Futurism was intrinsically a more positive line of attack than
Archaism was against an established dispensation. Marxism was thus a
telling ideological weapon for a militant Russia to adopt for use on a
world-wide spiritual arena; and, in the second place, it was likely to
minister to Russia’s other purpose—which was a prior need—of holding
her own against the West in the mastery of a Modern Western techno¬
logy; for Marxism exalted the economic factor in life above all others
and would therefore be an apt instrument for serving its Russian users’
purpose in the domestic field, where their task was to drive a traditionally
un-cconomic-minded Russian people into catching up with their
Western contemporaries, by forced marches, in a technological race in
which the Westerners had a long start and in which the stakes of the
event were life and death. These practical arguments in favour of sub¬
stituting Marxism for Orthodox Christianity 1 as the faith to which

« The Russians’ adoption of the Marxian Western heresy as their weapon for assailing
the Western orthodoxy of the src may be compared with the Safawis’ adoption of Imimi
Shi'ism as their weapon for assailing the Sunnism that was the orthodox version of
Islam in the Iranic World of Shah Ismi'il's generation (see I. i. 359 -b 5 )> The choice of
weapon was in both cases adroit without being cynical, because in both cases the motive
was subconscious.

* For Archaism and Futurism, see V. vi. 49-132.

* This adoption of an alien atheistic and materialist philosophy as a psychological
substitute for a native religion had a precedent in the hardly less strange transformation

136 encounters between contemporaries

Russia was to pin her pretension to be the heir to a unique destiny out¬
weighed the academic consideration that the pretension itself logically
fell to the ground with the repudiation of its traditional religious founda¬
tion, while the flagrancy of this betrayal of tradition and logic at the
dictation of raison d'ttat showed how near the Modern Western Civiliza¬
tion had already come to captivating the contemporary world, Russia
included, by the time when the Russian Communists raised their horn.

The Race between the West's Technological Advance and Russia's Techno¬
logical Westernization

The practical choice between the three theoretically alternative
Russian reactions to the aggression of the Modern West was not, of
course, ever decided by an academic debate* in the style of the discussion
of the respective merits of Democracy, Oligarchy, and Monarchy which
Herodotus puts into the mouths of Darius and his fellow assassins in
the political vacuum which they had created by their success in murder-

3 Smcrdis. 2 The Russian choice was made, for the most part, un-
ectivcly and unselfconsciously, from hand to mouth, in improvised
responses to successive Western challenges in the crude form of aggres¬
sive military attacks, and, on this analysis, the encounter between
Russia and the Modern West presented itself as a drama in which, down
to the time of writing, one plot had been recurring in successive perform¬
ances. The initial event in this recurrent plot was a sensational Western
military success at Russia’s expense which was patently accounted for
by the West’s technological superiority at the time; the second event was
an effort on Russia’s part to save her independence by mastering the
technique of the West up to the contemporary level at which it had
vindicated itself in Western hands so dangerously from Russia’s stand¬
point; the third event was a fresh ordeal by battle in which Russia
demonstrated, by successfully repulsing another Western attack, that
she had achieved her own latest technological objective; the fourth
event was a sensational fresh advance in Western technology which rang
up the curtain for a fresh performance of the drama by confronting
Russia, all over again, with a problem which, in the outgoing act, she
had solved ad hoc without (as now appeared) having succeeded in solving
it permanently. 1

In Russian history 4 the first performance of this repetitive drama was

of a Primitive Buddhist philosophy into the Mahayana in the course of its passage from
India to the Far East.

1 The nearest approach to this was the Marxian theological warfare—in which texts
from Marx’s, Engels’, and Lenin’s canonical works were hurled from both sides as missile
weapons—that was an accompaniment of the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, after
Lenin's death, for control over the Soviet Government.

2 See Herodotus, Book III, chaps. 80-83.

J See Annex I, pp. 674-5, below.

4 While the Russo-Western heat was the classical instance of a race between the
Modem West’s technological advance and a contemporary non-Wcstem society’s
technological Westernization, Russia was not the only non-Western society in this age
that was goaded into running this race by a recurring threat from a perpetually advancing
Western competitor.

'The greatest danger to the independent strength and freedom of initiative of a nation
like China (or Turkey) which is making an effort to adapt itself to the standards of the
West is that it thereby admits, at least by implication, the superior authority of the

THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 137
opened by the first establishment of contact between Russia and the
Modem West at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of
the Christian Era and was closed in 1812 by the victory of a Russia
that had been Westernized by Peter the Great over a Napoleon who was
the greatest Modern Western soldier up to date.

At the beginning of this performance the Russians were hardly yet
aware of the existence of ‘the Western Question’; and, on the strength
of the political union of Novgorod with Muscovy, and of a casual adop¬
tion of a few military applications of the Modem Western technolog)'
of the day, such as the use of fire-arms, Tsar Ivan IV rashly provoked
his Western neighbours by attempting to win for his united Russia a
broader frontage on the Baltic coast through the conquest of the inter¬
vening marches of the Western World. A facile initial success against the
already disintegrating regime of the Teutonic Order in the Baltic
Provinces brought Ivan into collision with Sweden and Lithuania, and
the ensuing trial of strength demonstrated the West’s contemporary
military superiority over Russia. So far from succeeding in extending
Russia's frontage on the Baltic, Ivan found himself compelled to cede to
Sweden even the strip of coastline at the head of the Gulf of Finland
which the Muscovite Empire had inherited from the Republic of
Novgorod; this discomfiture of Muscovy in the war of a.d. 1558-S3 was
followed by the Polono-Lithuanian occupation of Moscow in a.d. 1610-
12;' and, though, as between Russia and Poland-Lithuania, the eventual
balance of territorial gains and losses in this round of warfare was in
Russia’s favour, 2 it was not to her advantage in her account with
Sweden, 1 while the true measure of the relative strengths of Russia and
her Western adversaries was given, not by any fluctuations in frontiers,
but by the constant ability of sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century
Western armies to defeat contemporary Russian armies in the field.

This alarming experience of the inadequacy of native Russian military

West; with the result that, by the time it has mastered Westernization as a thing com¬
plete in itself, the West proper, whose Westernism is a living force informed with growth
and activity, has progressed spontaneously to a further point—with the result that the
nation striving for adaptation, having once admitted the authority of the alien standard,
finds itself still chronologically in arrears and accordingly restricted in the faculty of
initiative. Even in a nation like Japan, where the process of Westernizing was less an
adaptation than a transformation, a genuine phenomenon of rebirth, the effects of this
chronological handicap can very definitely be traced’ (Lattimore, Owen: Manchuria,
Cradle of Conflict (New York 1931, Macmillan), pp. 154-5).

1 See II. ii. 176.

1 In A.D. 1654 the Ukrainian Cossacks (see II. ii. 154-7) transferred their nominal
allegiance from Poland to Muscovy; in a.d. 1667 Muscovy acquired Smolensk and Kiev
from Poland-Lithuania by the Peace Treaty of Andrusovo; in a.d. 1686 these territorial
terms were confirmed in an ‘Eternal Peace' between the two Powers.

> The terms of the Russo-Swedish peace treaty concluded at Stolbovo in a.d. 1617
re-enacted those of the treaty of a.d. 1583 by reinstating Sweden in the possession of
even the atrip of originally Russian coastline, at the head of the Gulf of Finland, which
Russia had momentarily recovered from Sweden in the peace treaty concluded at
Tyavzhin in A.D. IS95, so that Russia found herself once again completely barred out
from access to the Baltic Sea. Even the distant English toyed, in a.d. 1612-13, with a
project for the acquisition of at least the north of Russia by the British Crown which
was submitted by a Scottish soldier. Captain Thomas Chamberlain, who had served
in a force of West European mercenaries sent in a.d. 1609 by the Swedish Govern¬
ment to the Tsar Vasilii Shuisky (see Lubimenko, Inna: ‘A Project for the Acquisition
of Russia by James I\ in The English Historical Review, vol. xxix (London 1914, Long¬
mans Green), pp. 246-56).

138 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
technique in warfare with Russia’s Modern Western neighbours was a
challenge which found its response in the Petrine ‘Herodian’ revolution. 1
Peter the Great’s first objective was to Westernize Russia’s armed forces,
on sea and land, up to the contemporary Western standard of efficiency;
to achieve this, he had also to Westernize Russian technology and public
administration; this in turn required provision for the higher education
of experts and officials up to the Western standard of the day; and Peter,
being a man of genius and vision, extended these minimum necessary
measures to embrace a comprehensive Westernization of a diluted
Muscovite nobility. 2 The success of this Petrine policy was foreshadowed
by Peter’s own victory, in a.d. 1709, over a rash Swedish invader of the
Ukraine, 3 and was demonstrated, eighty-seven years after Peter’s death,
when, in a.d. 1812, the Petrine Russian Empire brought to the ground a
French aggressor who had proved more than a match for all his Western
continental adversaries during the preceding fifteen years, and who was
invading Russia at the head of the united military forces of Continental
Western Europe.

The Napoleonic French Grand Army was a Western military instru¬
ment of a vastly higher calibre than the Polish expeditionary force which,
two hundred years earlier, had anticipated the French in the fatal feat of
momentarily occupying Moscow; and, after dividing with Great Britain
the honours of overthrowing Napoleon, Petrine Russia emerged from
this ordeal as the leading continental Power and pushed her western
continental frontiers so far westward as to include within them the
native Western province of ‘Congress Poland’. The post-Napoleonic
era saw a superficially Westernized Russia standing on a pinnacle of
apparent ascendancy; yet this appearance was already an illusion; for
the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of a.d. 1793-1815 were the last
Western wars on the grand scale that were fought with the pre-industrial
Western technique. By a.d. 1812 the Industrial Revolution was already
in full swing in England; and, though, in the Crimean War (gerebatur
a.d. 1853-6), Russia was still able to fight her Western adversaries on
more or less equal technological terms thanks to the conservatism of
contemporary French and British professional military minds, in the
seventh decade of the nineteenth century the American Civil War
(gerebatur a.d. 1861-5) and a Bismarckian Prussia’s three wars of aggres¬
sion (gerebantur a.d. 1864, *866, 1870-1) saw the new industrial tech¬
nique at last duly applied to warfare by Western Powers; 4 and in the
nineteenth century, as in the sixteenth century, Russia was caught nap¬
ping by a sudden sensational advance in her Western neighbours’
military technique.

1 A summary of Peter the Great’s work has been given in III. iii. 278-83.

* See VI. vii. 358, 360, and 361.

i Peter’s decisive victory over Charles XII in a.d. 1709 at Poltava, which had been
preceded by the conquest of Ingermanland, Narva, and Dorpat in a.d. 1701-4, was
followed in A.D. 1710 by the conquest of Karelia, Estland, Livland, and Riga. Peter’s
recognition that, in acquiring for Muscovy this frontage on the Baltic Sea, he had
achieved for her in his twenty-onc-ycars-long war (gerebatur a.d. 1700-21) what Ivan IV
had been seeking to achieve for her in his twenty-six-ycars-long war (gerebatur a.d.
1558-83) was expressed in the pageantrv of his triumphal entry into Moscow after
the conclusion of peace in a.d. 1721 (see Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of
Russia, p. 202). . « See IV. iv. 151-2.

THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 139

Once again, Russia rather casually adopted a few elements of the new
Western technical apparatus. In employing, for example, the device of
conquering a desert by building a railway, the Russians in Transcaspia 1
were ahead of the British in the Sudan; but, when, in the Russo-
Japanese War of a.d. 1904-5, a still no more than Petrine Russia pitted
her eighteenth-century Western armaments against the nineteenth-
century western armaments of a Post-Tokugawan Japan, she proved to
be a colossus with feet of clay; and, when, undeterred by this warning,
she ventured, ten years later, to measure her strength against Germany's
in the General War of a.d. 1914-18, the colossus collapsed. This shatter¬
ing experience of the inadequacy of the Petrine dispensation for enabling
Russia to hold her own in an industrialized world was the challenge to
which the Communist Marxian revolution was the response. The
Petrine regime had been all but overwhelmed by the abortive revolution
of a.d. 1905, which had been the Russian people's reaction to the Petrine
Russian Empire’s defeat by Japan. The utter disaster of a.d. 1914-18,
and its remorseless revelation of the extreme industrial backwardness
which had made it inevitable, brought the Bolsheviks into power and at
the same time determined their programme.

This programme was presented by Stalin in uncompromisingly
drastic language in a speech on the tasks of business executives delivered
at the First All-Union Conference of Managers of Socialist Industry on
the 4th February, 1931, 2 in the early days of his inter-war drive to
raise the technological efficiency of the Soviet Union to a new level.

‘The main thing is to have the passionate Bolshevik desire to master
technique, to master the science of production ... It is sometimes asked
whether it is not possible to slow down the tempo a bit... No! ... On
the contrary, we must increase it as much as is within our powers and
possibilities. ... To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind; and
those who fall behind get beaten....’

The imperative necessity for these superhuman exertions which he
was demanding of the people of the Soviet Union was driven home in
Stalin’s next words in this speech by an appeal to the lessons of Russian
history.

‘One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beating she
suffered for falling behind, for her backwardness. She was beaten by the
Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by
the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian
gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was
beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her—for her backwardness: for
military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for political backward¬
ness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. She was
beaten because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity....

‘Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its in¬
dependence? If you do not want this, you must put an end to its back¬
wardness in the shortest possible time and develop genuine Bolshevik
tempo in building up its socialist system of economy .... We are fifty or a

* See V. v. 323. n. 3, and d. 30, above.

1 English text in Stalin, Joseph: Leninism (London 1940, Allen and Unwin), pp.
359-67-

i 4 o ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this
distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.’

On the 4th May, 1935, when the urgency of Stalin’s technological
programme had been pointed by Hitler’s advent to power in Germany
and by his overt rearmament of the Third Reich, Stalin drove his
argument home in an address delivered in the Kremlin to the graduates
from the Red Army academies. 1

‘We inherited from the past a technically backward, impoverished, and
ruined country. Ruined by four years of imperialist war, and ruined again
by three years of civil war, a country with a semi-literate population, with
a low technical level, with isolated industrial oases lost in a sea ot dwart
peasant farms—such was the country we inherited from the past. I he
task was to transfer this country from mediaeval darkness to modern
industry and mechanised agriculture. ... The question that confronted
us was: Either we solve this problem in the shortest possible time, and
consolidate Socialism in our country - , or we do not solve it, in w - hich case
our country—weak technically and unenlightened in the cultural sense-
will lose its independence and become a stake in the game of the imperial¬
ist powers.’

The dose of Westernization that was administered to Russia by the
Bolsheviks differed from Peter’s dose in its application. The provinces
of Russian life which it affected were a smaller part of the total field; for,
whereas Peter had set out to Westernize almost everything in the life of a
diluted and expanded Muscovite nobility, the Bolsheviks rigidly con¬
fined their attentions to the province of technology, where they started
an intensive course of industrialization, and the province of ideology, in
which they sought to substitute a Marxian for a Christian orthodoxy.
Yet, if they did not range as widely as Peter over the surface of Russian
life, they made up for this by digging down far deeper below the surface
within the limited area to which they restricted their operations; and in
this difference in their Westernizing tactics they were faithfully reflecting
a change which had overtaken Western life itself, between Peter the
Great’s generation and theirs, as a result of the eruption of the two
elemental forces of Industrialism and Democracy. 2

The drive imparted by these forces had made mass-action a condition
of efficiency; and this portentous new ‘totalitarianism’, which was as
foreign to the bourgeois as it had been to the aristocratic native Western
tradition, was accepted wholeheartedly, and imposed without qualms,
by Russian Communists whose assumption of a Marxian heretical
Western costume could not erase from their Russian hearts and minds
the impress of deeply ingrained Orthodox Christian political habits,
however vehemently their Marxian wills might have repudiated the
Orthodox Christian tradition. As heirs, malgrS eux, of an Orthodox
Christian cultural heritage, they could not find the principle of ‘totali¬
tarianism’ either unfamiliar or shocking; for, in evoking a ghost of the
Roman Empire and subjecting the Orthodox Church to this resuscitated
Hellenic universal state, the main body of the Orthodox Christian Society

» English text in Sulin, op. cit., pp. 54 ®-S- 1 S «« 1V - iv - » 4 «“ 8 s-

THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 141
had forged a despotic institution of high potency;' and in the Russian
offshoot of Orthodox Christendom a comparable engine of despotism—
‘heavy as frost and deep almost as life’ 2 —had been constructed, since
the fourteenth century of the Christian Era, in Muscovy and her succes¬
sor the Petrine Russian Empire—a Russian state of which the Soviet
Union was the heir. J

The second bout in the dramatic encounter between Russia and the
Modern West accomplished its repetition of the plot of the play within
a much shorter span of time than the first bout had taken to illustrate
the same motif. An interval of no less than two centuries had separated
the Polish military occupation of Moscow in a.d. 1610-12, which had
been the ultimate stimulus of the Petrine Revolution, from the defeat of
Napoleon in a.d. 1812 which had been its final vindication, while there
was an interval of no more than thirty years between the German victory
over a Petrine Russia in a.d. 19x5, which was the genesis of the Soviet
regime, and the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany in a.d. 1945, by
which the Communist Revolution was vindicated in its generation.

This acceleration—which was perhaps to be explained as one of the
effects of a Western process of mechanization on the life of a Westerniz¬
ing World—was as evident in the sequel to the second performance of
the Russo-Western tragedy as it was in this second performance’s con¬
summation. After her triumph in a.d. 1812 the Petrine Russian Empire
had at any rate enjoyed half a century free from care before it had become
apparent that the Western World had for the second time stolen a march
on Russia by making an advance in technology that had once again
revolutionized the art of war. In a.d. 1945, the duration of the Soviet
Government’s rest-cure in a fool’s paradise was limited, by a rocket-
swift Zeitgeist, to a period of ninety' days. Germany had capitulated on
the 8th May, 1945; on the 6th August of the same year the first atomic
bomb was dropped by the Americans on Japan; and, from that latter
date onwards till the time of writing, Russia was again in the presence
of the same problem that had confronted her after the disaster of a.d.
1915 and the disaster of a.d. 1610-12. In the never-ending technological
race between Russia and her Western sister, the West had again forged
ahead of Russia so far as to leave her militarily at the mercy of her
Western contemporaries unless and until she could catch up again with
her formidable competitors for the third time, as she had succeeded in
catching up with them twice before.

The Soviet Union's Encounter with the United States

While this technico-military issue was still on the knees of the Gods,
it was already apparent on the political plane that, if the empire which
the Grand Duke Ivan III of Muscovy had brought into being by annex¬
ing Novgorod to his dominions in the eighth decade of the fifteenth
century was to be diagnosed as a Russian universal state, this polity had
been kept alive beyond its natural expectation of life by the galvanic
effect of the impact of the Modern West, as an expiring ‘Middle

« See IV. iv. 3 20-408 and X. ix. 15.

1 Wordiworth: Ode on Intimations of Immortality.

J See pp. 676-8, below.

142 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Empire’ of Egypt had been reanimated by the impact of the Hyksos, and
an expiring 'New Empire’ by the impact of ‘the Sea Peoples’.

On the analogy of the histories of universal states which had run their
course without this being appreciably affected by the play of external
forces, the Muscovite Russian Empire might have been expected to have
lapsed into anarchy, achieved a recovery, and eventually collapsed
irretrievably about four hundred years from the date of its original
establishment; and symptoms of all these three characteristic experi¬
ences in a universal state’s normal history duly present themselves in
this Russian case. The temporary lapse into anarchy is represented by
the rough passage which the Russians themselves had named ‘the Time
of Troubles’ ( instabat a.d. 1604-12)-, 1 the recover}' by the rally under
the new regime of the Romanov Dynasty; 2 and the eventual collapse by
the adversity into which the Romanov Empire fell in the course of the
thirty-six years beginning with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II
in a . d . 1881 and ending with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in a . d .
1917.* If the tragedy had played itself out to the end in conformity with
the conventional plot, this last act would have seen the empire that had
been founded by Ivan III and been enlarged by his successors fall to
pieces into a number of parochial successor-states of barbarian or
indigenous origin; and, after the Bolshevik Revolution of a.d. 1917,
there were symptoms of this characteristic denouement likewise. At
this stage, however, the tendency for events to take their typical course
was overborne by a more powerful current making for the rehabilitation
of the foundered universal state in a new shape.

Between a.d. 1917 and a.d. 1922 4 all the momentarily dislocated frag¬
ments of the former Russian Empire, except a splinter of Transcaucasia 5
and a belt of border territories on the Empire’s western fringe, whose
populations were Westerners in their culture, were reintegrated under
the rule of a single indigenous successor-state which assumed, on the
30th December, 1922, the title of a ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’;
and thereafter, as a result of the outcome of the General War of a.d.
1 939 “ 45 > the Soviet Union not only recovered the lost western dominions
of the Romanov Empire but imposed its political ascendancy over Con¬
tinental European territories still farther to the west, up to a line which
the Romanov Empire had never approached—not even at the zenith of
its military and political power in a.d. 1814-15. 6

« See I. i. S 3 , n. 2; II. ii. 157 and 176; IV. iv. 90 and 91-92; V. v. 311, n. 2; V. vi.
19s, n. 2, and 311.

1 Sec V. vi. 212. > See V. vi. 311, n. 3.

* On the 14th November, 1922, the reunification of the non-Wcstem territories form¬
erly embraced in the Russian Empire was completed by the merger of the Far Eastern
Republic in the Socialist Federal Soviet Republic of Great Russia.

l Consisting of the districts of Qars and Ardahan and a portion of the district of
Batum (excluding the port ar.d town of Batum itself), which had been definitively retro¬
ceded to Turkey in a.d. 1921.

6 In A.D. 1945 «he western frontier of the Soviet Union itself still embraced less terri¬
tory inhabited by Westerners than had been included within the western frontier of the
Romanov Empire in A.D. 1914; for, while the Soviet Union had now reannexed to
Russia the three inter-war republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Soviet Lithuania
overlapped with no more than the north-eastern comer of the former Romanov dominion
of ‘Congress Poland’, and only a fraction of the former Romanov dominion of Finland
—the Karelian Isthmus—had been reannexed from the inter-war Finnish Republic. On

THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 143

This Phocnix-like resurrection of a Romanov Empire in the shape of
the Soviet Union with its glacis of satellite states was the response of an
obstinately persisting Russian will to independence in face of a menace
of extinction which had never been more acute than when, on the
morrow of the General War of a.d. 1914-18, a prostrate Russia’s
recent Western or Westernized allies—France, Great Britain, the
United States, and Japan—had followed suit to her recent Western
adversary Germany in invading her by force of arms in military opera¬
tions which, in Russian eyes, were not acquitted of being aggressive in
virtue of their being professedly undertaken with the object of putting
back a non-Communist Russian regime into the saddle. The cumulative
effect of the German military invasion of Russia in and after a.d. 1915,
the inter-ally military invasion of Russia in and after a.d. 1918, and the
renewed German military invasion of Russia in and after a.d. 1940 had
been to conjure back into being a Russian polity which was not merely
an unseasonable avatar of a time-expired Russian universal state but
was one of two super-great Powers in a Westernizing World, now co¬
extensive with the whole surface of the planet, in whose political
articulation the number of Powers of the highest calibre had been re¬
duced to two from eight in the course of thirty-one years (a.d 1914-45)
as a result of two world wars in one life-time.

What were to be the Soviet Union’s role and fate in the next chapter
of the history of Russia’s encounter with the West ? The geographical
configuration of human affairs on the morrow of the World War of a.d.
1939-45 might appear to portend the approach of a climax in the history,
not only of the Russian and the Western civilizations, but of a species of
society—Civilization itself—which, by that date, had been in existence
for some five or six thousand years and whose living representatives
were civilizations of the third generation.

The Soviet Union and the United States, whose gigantic forms now,
between them, overshadowed the political landscape, and whose rival
championship of two competing ideologies was gathering the whole of
Mankind into two opposing spiritual camps, displayed a resemblance to
one another which was not confined to the external point of their com¬
mon pre-eminence over all their contemporaries in their order of material
magnitude; they also possessed in common the more intimate feature of
being planted, both alike, on culturally new ground, and of experiencing
the stimulus which the conquest of new ground is apt to bring with it. 1

the other hand the Soviet Union had compensated itself for its comparative moderation
in rcannexing populations of Western culture by establishing its political ascend¬
ancy over a team of satellite Western states whose territories covered, between them,
not only the unannexed major part of Finland, but the whole of Continental Eastern
Europe between the new western frontier of the Soviet Union and a line running
approximately south and north from the northern flank of the Austrian Alps to the
southern shore of the Baltic Sea. Within this area, in a.d. 1952, the Soviet Union was
effectively dominant over a post-war Poland covering the whole area in which a majority
of the population was Polish in nationality, sa well as a strip of formerly German-
inhabited territory between the Polish-inhabited area and the Oder-Neisse line; over a
zone of Germany, west of the Oder, surrounding Berlin; over a zone of Austria, surround¬
ing Vienna; and over Czechoslovakia and Hungary, besides Rumania, Bulgaria, and
Albania. At that date it remained to be seen whether the Soviet Union would succeed
in reasserting ita ascendancy over a dissident Communist Jugoslavia and in bringing a
compliant Communist regime into power in Greece. 1 See II. ii. 73-100.

144 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

The territory of the United States had been culturally virgin soil, save
for a fringe of the Mexic Civilization’s former cultural domain in the
upper basin of the Rio Grande, before trans-oceanic colonists from
Western Europe had begun to take possession of it in the seventeenth
century of the Christian Era; and the territory of the Soviet Union and
its satellites' was comparatively new ground likewise. Apart from the
Oxus-Jaxartes Basin and Transcaucasia, hardly any of it had ever been
occupied by any sedentary civilization before the turn of the tenth and
eleventh centuries of the Christian Era; the Russian occupation of the
Donetz, Don, Lower Volga, Urals, and Siberia had not begun till the
sixteenth century of the Christian Era, when Muscovy had embarked on
an eastward and south-eastward expansion overland that was not in¬
comparable in scale with the contemporary expansion of the maritime
peoples of Western Europe overseas; and, as one consequence of the
intensive industrialization of the Soviet Union, the centre of gravity of
its economic life had latterly been shifting more and more out of the
original homeland of the Russian Civilization in the North-East
European forests into these recently occupied territories which had been
Nomad’s land or Primitive Man’s preserve before Russian enterprise
had opened them up as fresh fields for the cultivation of a different way
of life.

While the Soviet Union and the United States were both thus laid
out on recently virgin soil, they confronted one another across a belt of
territories embracing all the rest of the domains, in the Old World, of all
the living civilizations of Old-World origin and the entire domains of
all these living civilizations’ predecessors of earlier generations. This
political and ideological no-man’s-land enveloped the Old World’s
Soviet heartland like an immense crescent-shaped festoon with its
extremities in the high latitudes of Northern Japan and Scandinavia
and with its bow sagging down below the Equator in Indonesia. 2 This
zone contained the Japanese offshoot and the Chinese main body of the
Far Eastern Civilization; the Tantric Mahayanian fossils of the extinct
Indie Civilization in Mongolia and Tibet; the Hinayanian fossils of the
same extinct civilization in Cambodia, Siam, Burma, and Ceylon; the
Hindu Civilization; the Islamic Civilization from its eastern outposts
in the Southern Philippines and Western China to its western outposts
on the Atlantic coast of Africa; the main body of Orthodox Christendom
in South-Eastern Europe; and the European homeland of the Western
Civilization.

Each of the mansions occupied by these divers bodies social had a
continental back door accessible from the Soviet heartland of the Old
World and a maritime front door accessible from the Americas across
the Ocean. They were thus all open to simultaneous and competitive
penetration by the two colossi that were bestriding a post-Hitlerian
World; and, impotent though their tenants were to hold their own,
should occasion arise, against either of their two gigantic neighbours,
their existence was nevertheless the key to the balance of political power,
since this balance could hardly fail to incline decisively in favour of the

1 Sec xi, map. 49. * See XII. ix. 488-9, and xi, map 65.

THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 145

giant, whichever of the two it might be, who should succeed in drawing
into his own camp a majority of these denizens of an intervening
no-man’s-land whose bodies were to be the prizes of a political and ideo¬
logical tug-o’-war.

On the precedent of comparable conjunctures in the histories of other
civilizations, this political situation in a Westernizing World on the
morrow of a Second World War might be read to mean that the Western
Civilization had now arrived at a stage in a losing battle against disinte¬
gration at which it was on the eve of entering into a universal state, and
that a third world war was the crushingly heavy price that Destiny was
going to exact for the barren opportunity of achieving this abortive
rally. 1 Whatever may have been the current expectations of the rulers
of the Soviet Union and their subjects, there were certainly many people
in the Western World at this time who were fatalistically foreboding a
third world war in which the United States and the Soviet Union would
be the respective principals, and from which a literally world-wide
universal state would arise through the elimination, vi et armis , of one
or other of these two remaining Great Powers. If that was in truth Man¬
kind’s unescapable destiny, this would mean that the Bolsheviks had
achieved their tour de force of resuscitating the Russian Empire at the
cost of condemning it to hazard its existence on a venture that must
issue in either world power or downfall. As a result of a third world
war, should this calamity overtake Mankind, it would seem that the
Soviet Union must either win the invidiously brilliant distinction of
providing a reluctant Western World with an alien universal state such
as the ‘Osmanlis had imposed on the main body of Orthodox Christen¬
dom, and the Mughals and their British successors on the Hindu World,
or alternatively suffer a disaster that would undo the work of Stalin and
Lenin and Peter and Ivan III alike by pulverizing this vast body politic
into fragments smaller than the fifteenth-century Grand Duchy of
Moscow and Republic of Novgorod whose union had been the Russian
Empire’s genesis.

Was one or other of these extreme alternative denouements inevitable ?
At the time of writing, it would have been wilful blindness to ignore the
signs pointing to a third world war as the line of least resistance for a
world whose ability to be master of its own destiny was manifestly at
this time an open question. At the same time it would have been wanton
‘defeatism’ to discount other, perhaps not less convincing, signs of the
times which suggested that a shatteringly Wagnerian overture might
resolve itself into a prosaically Benthamite anticlimax.

While it was certain, in the minds of Western observers, that the
Americans’ sense of destiny would never tempt them to take the initia¬
tive in going to war with the Soviet Union, there was no warrant for
assuming, on the other hand, that the Russians’ sense of destiny would
betray the inveterately cautious and deliberate Muscovite political
chess-players into rushing in where their impulsive American opponents
feared to tread. Even if the Soviet Government were one day to convince
itself that, in a perpetually recurring race for the goal of technological
' These prospects are discussed in XII. ix. 524-36-

I 4 6 encounters between contemporaries

efficiency, it had caught up with the United States, as it had once suc¬
ceeded in catching up with Germany, this reassuring conviction would
not necessarily move the Russians to take the offensive. An offensive
war against an encompassing world of hostile infidels was not com¬
mended either by Soviet mythology or by Russian experience. Marxism
had appropriated the Jewish myth of an inoffensive Chosen People
which, in a war that it has never sought, is to win a miraculous victory
against overwhelming odds over a coalition of enemies who have brought
their doom upon themselves by banding together in the pride of their
hearts to make an unprovoked assault on Zion. 1 The Russian people had
thrice experienced the exultation of snatching victory out of defeat in
fighting on their own ground against apparently irresistible Western
invaders of Holy Russia, while they had also more than once experi¬
enced the humiliation of being checked, or defeated outright, on foreign
soil by opponents who were not the Russians’ match in numbers or
resources—as they had been checked by the Turks in Rumelia in the
Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1877-8, 2 and defeated by the Japanese in
Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese War of a.d. 1904-5. These considera¬
tions suggested that the twentieth-century tension between the Soviet
Union and the United States was not bound to result in war in the
nineteen-fifties, but might alternatively relax without catastrophe, as
the nineteenth-century tension between the Russian Empire and the
British Empire had relaxed in the eighteen-eighties.

If this unapocalyptic denouement were in fact to come to pass, the
Russian Empire founded by Ivan III and resuscitated by Lenin might
be expected to survive at a mezzanine altitude of political eminence.
This messianic ‘Third Rome’ would then find her level as a polity of far
lower stature than the alien universal state of a forcibly united Western
World which she would have had to become if she was to have escaped
destruction in the event of a third world war; but on the other hand she
would then stand out head and shoulders above the ordinary parochial
states of a politically still divided Western World, instead of joining their
ranks in the modest role of an undistinguished recruit for which Mus¬
covy had been cast by Peter the Great, and into which the Soviet Union
had appeared to be lapsing in the nineteen-thirties. 3 In a Westernizing
World, in which other kingdoms and lands, outside the frontiers of the
Soviet Union herself and her involuntary satellites, had found security
against their fear of Soviet attack and Communist penetration by volun¬
tarily entering into a free political association with the United States and
with one another to the extent required for effective common defence
and common pursuit of material and spiritual welfare, the Soviet Union
might be expected to play something like the role which the Parthian
and Kushan Powers had played in the Transeuphratean continental
hinterland of a Hellenizing World 4 when a ring of maritime countries
encircling the Mediterranean had been gathered together under the aegis
of Rome in a Pax Augusta .*

1 For the Marxist version of this apocalyptic Jewish myth, see V. v. 183.

* See XII. ix. 512-13. * See V. v. 183-8. * See XII. ix. 528-9.

5 For the role of the Mediterranean in the human geography of the Roman Empire,
see VI. vii. 81, ns. X, 2, 3, and 4, and X. ix. 657-62.

THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 147

The Modem Western Civilization, like the Hellenic, had started life
as a maritime society and had expanded by seamanship before laying
iron rails on land; and, in an age when a world that had thus been
Westernized through the conductive medium of the high seas was
crystallizing politically round the ocean-girt island of North America, it
was hardly to be expected that this process would extend very far be¬
yond the maritime fringes of the Old World into its land-locked heart¬
land, any more than it was to be expected that a land power centred on
Moscow would ever be able to establish its dominion over the isles of the
sea. These geographical considerations suggested that, if the habitable
and traversable surface of the planet were to be unequally divided
between the whale and the bear in proportions that would leave to the
bear an inalienable residue of intractably continental territory, the two
monsters might settle down side by side to live and let live; and, in an
age of low political and high technological tension, such as this common-
sense division of the World might be expected to inaugurate, it could be
forecast that the practical compromises between free enterprise and
regimentation covered by the rival ideological labels ‘Liberalism* and
‘Communism’ would gradually become less unlike one another de
facto , 1 as the rulers of Moscow began to be less tyrannically obsessed
by fear, while the Western peoples continued to purchase further instal¬
ments of technological efficiency 2 and social justice at the inevitable cost
of further self-imposed restrictions on the freedom of individuals to take
undue advantage of their neighbours.

In this unsensationally happy event the historical role of the Com¬
munist ideology and the Soviet Union might prove in retrospect, from a
Western standpoint, to have been that of the Mephistophelian spirit

Die stets das B6se will und stets das Gute schafft. 1

An abortive Russian challenge to the captivation of the World by a
secularized Modern Western Civilization might turn out to have re¬
dounded to the benefit of the vast depressed proletarian majority of
Mankind—the proletarian civilizations and the proletarian lower orders
in a Westernizing World whose Western makers and managers had
once reigned, as oecumenical ‘lords of creation’, over a host of ‘Natives’ 4
and ‘Poor Whites’ amounting to an overwhelming majority of the
living generation of Mankind.

In the economically unified but morally still divided world of the
nineteenth century of the Christian Era, the primitive peasantry of
Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, China, Indo-China, Indonesia, India,
South-West Asia, Egypt, Tropical Africa, and Latin America,* and even
the urban industrial 'working class’ in North America and Western
Europe, were living, on the material plane, on a level shockingly far
below the contemporary level of the North American and West European
bourgeoisie; and this evil of provocative inequality between sectional

' On this point, see V. v. 188. . ...

* Mechanization exacts its price in regimentation, as has been noticed in III. iu.
20Q-12. See further XII. ix. 563-77-.

) Goethe: Faust, II. 1335-6. quoted in II. i. 282.

♦ See I. i. 151-3. 1 Sec Annex I, pp. 684-90, below.

I 4 8 encounters between contemporaries

classes, like the twin evil of discord between parochial states, had been
a malady by which Civilization had been afflicted since the first emerg¬
ence of this species of society. Hitherto, Civilization’s marvellous material
and spiritual fruits had been branded with the mark of Cain; for hitherto
they had been the monopoly of a privileged minority whose exclusive
enjoyment of them was a practical repudiation of the human social
creature’s inalienable obligation to be his brother’s keeper. The obliga¬
tion was inalienable because sub-Man had succeeded in becoming
human only in virtue of having become a social animal first, 1 and this
sociality was so essential an element in Human Life that the energy and
genius of even the most active and most gifted individual human being
would always have remained barren if it had not been brought to harvest
by the co-operative labours of the strong man’s weaker brethren.

A privileged minority’s refusal to recognise this elemental truth and
act upon it had been one cause of the breakdowns and disintegrations of
civilizations in the course of the first five or six thousand years in the
history of societies of this species; but, in a world that had been unified
by the technological prowess of a civilization of the third generation, ‘the
cornucopia of the engineer’, ‘shaken over all the Earth’ and ‘scattering
everywhere an endowment of previously unpossessed and unimagined
capacities and powers’,* had estopped the privileged minority’s tradi¬
tional plea that the fruits of Civilization, if they were to be enjoyed at
all, must be the monopoly of a small fraction of Mankind because the
productive powers of Civilization were unequal to the task of producing
enough of these luxuries for distribution to all. By the middle of the
twentieth century of the Christian Era an Industrial Revolution that,
by this date, had been gathering momentum for more than 150 years
had brought within sight a prospect of distributing the fruits of Civiliza¬
tion far more widely, at any rate, than had ever been imagined in the
most utopian dreams in the past—however severely it might tax Nature’s
resources and Man’s resourcefulness if Mankind were to set itself the
task of raising the Asiatic coolie’s material standard of living to the level
already attained by a West European working class, not to speak of a
North American bourgeoisie. Short of attempting forthwith to fulfil
such counsels of perfection, there was manifestly a huge interim pay¬
ment on account of social justice which a privileged minority already had
it in its power to make, if it also had the will; and this was the gravamen
of a Marxian indictment of ‘Capitalism’ which had been taken as the text
for a Russian denunciation of a secularized Modern Western way of life.

In thus denouncing the children of a Modern Western ‘ascendancy’
for their failure to pay a moral debt up to the progressively expanding
limits of their capacity to discharge it, Communism was proclaiming in
a challengingly loud un-Christian voice a commandment of Christ’s
which, on the Christian Church’s lips, had sunk to a discreetly in¬
audible whisper repeated by churchmen under their breath; and, if
Marxism was nevertheless a heresy from a truly Christian point of view,
this was because, like most other heresies in their day, it had taken up
arms on behalf of one grievously neglected Christian truth to the still

* See I. i. 173. * Sir Alfred Ewing, quoted in III. iii. 2ix.

THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA i 49
more grievous neglect of this one Christian truth’s Christian setting.
Through the militancy and the animus of its ideological offensive,
Communism had deprived itself of any prospect of reconverting a
privileged minority in the Western World to the social gospel of Christ¬
ianity in an anti-Christian dress; but, in the act of thus spiking its own
guns, it had reopened for Christianity a prospect of reconverting ex-
Christian Western souls to the Christian gospel in its integrity, including
its social implications. In ‘the cold war’ which seemed likely to settle the
World's fate in the current chapter of the World’s history, the decisive
weight in the scales would be the sufferings of the vast ‘under-privileged’ 1
majority of the living generation of Mankind, and this multitude of
suffering human beings might be expected to throw in its lot with
whichever of the two Powers that were now competing for its allegiance
gave practical proof that it was carrying out the social gospel of Christ¬
ianity de facto.

In these circumstances, self-interest would counsel a privileged
minority among a dominant Western fraction of Mankind to discard
the drill-sergeant’s rod and take up Orpheus’ lyre. 2 This change of
external insignia, however, would be morally sterile so long as the motive
for it was one of policy alone; for the Thracian wizard’s instrument
cannot exert its magic charm unless its music is a genuine expression of
the feelings in the player’s heart. To achieve its purpose, a calculated
policy of philanthropy would have to be caught up and carried away by
a spontaneous outburst of love; and, if the grace of God were to bring
about this miracle in ex-Christian Western hearts genuinely smitten
with contrition, and not merely with a self-interested alarm, by the
hammer strokes of a Communist challenge, then an encounter between
the Modern Western World and Russia, which had already changed the
course of Russian history by prolonging the life-span of a time-expired
Russian universal state, might also change the course of Modern
Western history by rejuvenating a body social in which the familiar
symptoms of disintegration had already made their appearance. If this
encounter were to have this outcome, this might prove to be the opening
of a wholly new chapter in the history’ of Mankind.

1 ThU term ‘under-privileged’ was current in an American middle-class vocabulary
at this time as a euphemistic substitute for the stark word ‘unprivileged’. In American
mouths ‘under-privileged’ was a less unpalatable term, because it suggested that the
difference of level was not very- great; that its elimination was already on the agenda;
and that ‘privilege’ itself was, not an abuse which ought to be abolished, but an objective
which could and should be attained by Everyman. ‘Under-privileged’ was, however,
a flagrantly illogical term, considering that the conferment ofa favoured minority’s privi¬
leges on member* of a depressed class must still leave a residual depressed majority on
an implicitly unacceptable lower level or, alternatively, must abolish ‘privilege’ itself
if the whole, or even only a majority, of this hitherto depressed majority were to be
brought up to a hitherto privileged minority’s standard. A ‘privilege’ that is shared by
everybody, or even only by a majority, is a tontradiclio in adjreto, and a psychologist
would perhaps have deduced from this revealingly illogical American euphemism the
existence of an unresolved conflict in the souls of middle-class Americans between a
natural human desire to retain the relatively high standard of living which they were now
enjoying as members of an invidiously privileged minority and a conscience which must
reproach itself so long as this stigma of privilege was associated with a standard which,
in bourgeois American eyes, was justifiable for middle-class Americans in virtue of its
being a natural and normal human right that, by implication, must be Everyman’s due.

2 Sec IV. iv. 123-4 13*-

150 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

2. The Modern West and the Main Body of Orthodox Christendom

The difference between the Ottoman Orthodox Christian and the Muscovite
Reaction to the West

The reception of the Modern Western culture in the main body of
Orthodox Christendom was coeval with its reception in Russia. In both
these Orthodox Christian bodies social, this Westernizing movement
set in towards the close of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era.
In both cases the movement was a sharp and sudden revulsion from a
long-sustained and apparently hard-set attitude of hostility towards a
Western World and Western way of life which Orthodox Christians
had learnt to detest through a previous experience of the West in
an encounter with it in the medieval chapter of its history; and, in
both cases again, one cause of this seventeenth-century psychological
revolution in Orthodox Christian souls was a no less sharp and sudden
antecedent psychological change in the West itself-—the inversion of an
intolerant religious fanaticism into a cynical irreligious tolerance which
reflected a profound disillusionment in Western souls w’ith the inconclu¬
sive political and devastating moral consequences of the Early Modern
Western domestic Wars of Religion. On the political plane, however,
these two contemporary and psychologically similar Orthodox Christian
Westernizing movements followed very different courses.

This difference was due to a diversity in the political situation in
which the two sister societies found themselves at the turn of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, when the modern impact of the West on both
of them began. At that time, either society was in its universal state; but,
whereas the Russian Orthodox Christian universal state was an indigen¬
ous one that had been brought into being by the Muscovite Grand Duke
Ivan Ill’s annexation of Novgorod to Muscovy in the eighth decade of
the fifteenth century, the main body of Orthodox Christendom had had
its universal state imposed on it by alien Ottoman hands about a hundred
years earlier; 1 and this difference in the origin and character of the two
universal states led the two societies to give different political answers
to the same ‘Western Question’. The seventeenth-century' Russian
Westernizing movement was evoked, as we have seen, 2 primarily by a
fear that an indigenous Russian universal state might be overthrown by
Western Powers who had demonstrated their military superiority in the
Wars of a.d. 1558-1617; the seventeenth-century Serb and Greek
Westernizing movements were evoked not by a fear but by a hope that
an alien Ottoman Empire might be overthrown by Western Powers who
were demonstrating their military' superiority over the ‘Osmanlis in the
War of a.d. 1682-99. In Russia a Westernizing movement designed to
salvage the independence of an existing Russian state was launched from
above downwards by a cultural revolutionary who was at the same time
the Tsar and who used his sovereign power to impose Westernization
on his subjects willy nilly; in the Ottoman Empire, Westernizing move-

1 The Ottoman dominion over the main body of Orthodox Christendom was effec¬
tively established in A.D. 1371-2, when the ‘Osmanlis conquered Macedonia (sec III.
iii. 26). * On pp. 132-4, above.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 151

ments that ultimately aspired to recapture political independence for
Serbs, Greeks, and other subject Orthodox Christian peoples by under¬
mining and subverting an existing Ottoman Power were launched from
below upwards, not by princes performing acts of state, but through the
private enterprise of non-sovereign individuals and communities.

The Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christian Phobia of the West

It may be convenient first to examine the seventeenth-century cul¬
tural reorientation of Serb and Greek souls from an Ottoman towards a
Western qiblah ; then to trace the course of the consequent Westernizing
movement on the cultural, social, and political planes; and finally to
consider the eventual effect of Westernization on the relations between
these non-Russian Orthodox Christian peoples and a Modern Western
World whose impact had turned their lives also upside down.

The seventeenth-century revolution in the attitude of Orthodox
Christians towards the West signified an even greater change in Serb and
Greek than in Russian hearts if the respective degrees of their previous
hostility towards the West can be gauged by the respective lengths to
which they had shown themselves willing to go in sacrificing their other
interests to an overriding determination not to submit to Western
ascendancy in its medieval form of an assertion of Papal supremacy on
the ecclesiastical plane. While the Russian ‘Zealots’ had egged on the
Greek 'Zealots’ to repudiate the ecclesiastical union of the Eastern
Orthodox with the Roman Church that had been achieved on paper at
Florence in a.d. 1439, l ^' s anti-Western intransigence of theirs had cost
them no appreciable sacrifice, since they had not been confronted, as the
Greeks had been in this crisis, with the grim prospect of having to pay
forthwith for their strict ecclesiastical virtue at the exorbitant political
price of forfeiting the last shreds of their independence to a Turkish
Muslim conqueror. In the years a.d. 1453-61, which saw Greek rule at
Constantinople, in the Morea, and at Trebizond extinguished by the
Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror, the Tatar tide was already
ebbing from the steppe-coast of Muscovy, while, on her opposite
frontier, the Lithuanian tide was no longer advancing. 1 Thus the
Russians, unlike the Greeks and Serbs, had not been compelled to
choose between the Pope’s tiara and the Prophet’s turban; 2 and, if the
Russians nevertheless found it psychologically difficult to reverse their

* It had reached its high-water mark in A.D. 1449. and it began to recede in A.D. 1494
(see Spruncr, K. von, and Menke, Th.: Hand-Allot fur die Getchichte des Mitulalters
unddrr Ntveren Zcit, 3rd ed. (Gotha 1880, Perthes), plates 69 and 70).

* See the passage, in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, chap, lxviii, that has been cited in I. i. 29 and IV. iv. 71. Kpa-rrOstpoy
ionv elSitoi «V 7$ voXei to ^<uaoAtov' fiaotXevov Tovdkcov yjKahurrrpav Aannxijr, is
the original Greek of the exclamation ascribed to the Grand Duke Louki* Notoris by
the Greek historian Dhoiikas: Historia Byzantina, ed. by Bekker, J.^Bonn 1834, Weber),

f . 264. The corresponding popular catchword was npdrrov iuireottv «‘S X ,! P ai
ovokuiv n ^payKwv, ibid., p. 291. As early as the twelfth century the same preference
in face of the same choice had been indicated by the Oecumenical Patriarch Michael
Ankhfalos (fungebatur a.d. i 160—i i 77) in a passage quoted by Every, G.: The Byzantine
Patriarchate, 451-1204 (London 1947. S.P.C.h.), pp. 182-3. The vehemence of the
Orthodox Christians’ anti-Western feeling in the fifteenth century is indicated by the
fact that such 'slogans’ were current in Constantinople in A.D. 1453 when Mehmed
the Conqueror was at the gates.

152 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
attitude towards the West two hundred years later, it must have been
still more difficult for their contemporary Greek and Serb co-religionists
to recede from a stand against the West which they had maintained at
the cost of subjection to Ottoman rule.

The traditional phobia of the West in Greek Orthodox Christian
souls did, indeed, die hard. It cost the life of the Westernizing Cretan
Greek Oecumenical Patriarch Cyril Loukaris (vivebat a.d. 1572-1638;
munere pairiarchali oecumenico fungebatur aj>. 1620-38), and, some five
generations later, it was still strong enough to frustrate the intellectual
labours of the Westernizing Greek humanist Evy&nios Voulgharis (vive¬
bat a.d. 1716-1806).

The Defeat of Cyril Loukaris'

Lotikaris paid with his life for being the Orthodox Christian pioneer
in a first attempt to establish communion between the Orthodox Christian
and the Protestant churches; and his fatal failure to carry his own church
with him in this ecclesiastical manceuvre is the more remarkable, con¬
sidering that Loukaris’ strategic aim was to establish an Orthodox-Protes-
tant common front against a Roman Catholicism which, in Orthodox
Christian eyes in Loukaris’ day, was still the classic version of a Western
schismatic Christianity.

While Loukaris had been mentally prepared for his role as a Wcstern-
izer by having received a Western education on Western ground, 2 his
policy of Westernization in the particular form of an entente with
Calvinism was the outcome of a mission to Poland-Lithuania on which
he was sent in a.d. 1596 by his kinsman and patron Meletios Pighds, the
Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria and at that time also Acting Oecumeni¬
cal Patriarch of Constantinople. The occasion of this mission was the
ecclesiastical crisis precipitated by the move, in a.d. 1594, for a union
of the Orthodox Church in Poland-Lithuania with the Roman Church 3
on the terms agreed at Florence in a.d. 1439. One motive for this move
was the political problem that would have been created for the Kingdom
of Poland-Lithuania by the transfer of these Orthodox Christian subjects
of a Western state from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Oecumenical
Patriarchate of Constantinople, under which they had remained hitherto,
to that of the autocephalous Patriarchate of Moscow, 4 newly established
in a.d. 1589, 5 which styled itself ‘the Patriarchate of all Russia’, and
whose incumbent was a political subject of the Tsar of Muscovy. 6

1 Sec Meyer, Ph., a.v. ‘Lukaris, Kyrillos*. in Herzog, J. J., and Hauck, A.: Real-
encyklopsdiefur Protestantische Theologie und Kirche, vol. xi (Leipzig 1902, Hinrichs),
Dp. 6S2-90; Rhenium, M.: KvpiXXos Aovnapir, 6 Oixovuenxoi harpidpx^i (Athens 1859,
Mavrommiitis); Pichler, A.: DerPatriarch Cyrillus Lukaris undseineZeit (Munich 1862,
Lcntner (Stahl)); Mettctal, A.: Eludes Hisloviques sur le Palriareht Cyrille Lucar (Stras¬
bourg 1869, Silbermann). Two hundred and sixteen documents concerning Lodkaris’
life and tenets will be found in Lcgrand, E.: Bibliographic HelUnique, ou Description
Rais on nee des Outrages Publiis par des Crecs au Dvc-seplieme Siiele (Paris 1894-1903,
Picard (vol*. i-iv) and Maisonneuve (vol. v)), vol. iv, pp. 175-521.

1 See p. 171, below. J Sec p. r28, above.

4 See Pichler, A.; Der Patriarch Cyrillus Lukaris undseine Zeit (Munich r862, Lent-
ner), p. 54. _ _ » See VI. vii. 34-35.

6 The distance of Russia from Constantinople had made it possible (see pp. 676-7,
below) for Russian princes to accept, without having to fear any awkward political conse¬
quences in practice, an ecclesiastical j urisdiction which was felt to be an intolerable poli tical

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 153

Lorikaris was posted in a.d. 1596 to the rectorship of the Orthodox
monastery at Vilna in order to act as Meletios’s unofficial observer,'
and he was Meletios’s official exarch in Poland from July 1599 to
March 1601. 2 He was present 1 at the anti-Uniate Orthodox synod at
Brest in a.d. 1596, 4 and at a joint synod of the Orthodox and Protestant
churches of Poland-Lithuania which opened at Vilna on the 15th May,
1599.5 This attempt at an Orthodox-Protestant union on Polish-
Lithuanian soil broke down, in spite of the incentive of a common
menace in the shape of the Counter-Reformation, owing to an insistence,
on the Orthodox side, that the Protestants should accept the Oecumeni¬
cal Patriarch’s ecclesiastical supremacy; 6 yet this diplomatic failure
neither checked Loukaris’ ecclesiastical career nor deterred him from his
subsequent Calvinizing course.

In a.d. 1602, before he had turned thirty, Loukaris succeeded Meletios
as Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria; 7 he became Acting Oecumenical
Patriarch in a.d. 1612, 8 and Oecumenical Patriarch in a.d. 1620; 9 and the
hostility that he drew upon himself by his courage in using this eminent
position as a vantage point for the pursuit of a revolutionary policy
made his career stormy and his end tragic. Between his enthronement in
a.d. 1620 and his execution in a.d. 1638 he experienced vicissitudes of

menace (see IV. iv. 377 ~S 3 ) by a Khan of Bulgaria whose dominion slay at Constantinople’s
doors. The fact that in constitutional theory they were acknowledging the political sove¬
reignty of a foreign potentate in accepting the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of an Oecumenical
Patriarch who was that foreign potentate’s subject and minister did not deter the Rus¬
sians from declaring themse Ives the Oecumenical Patriarch’s ecclesiastical subjects by
receiving a Greek candidate of the Patriarch’s as Metropolitan of Kiev in A.D. 1039 (see
pp. 399-400, below), though at that date the Oecumenical Patriarch’s sovereign lord was
the Emperor of an East Roman Empire which, to outward appearance, was then still at
the zenith of its power (actually it had already brought both itself and the whole Ortho¬
dox Christian body social to ruin, through an internecine war with Bulgaria in a.d. 977-
1019). A fortiori, in subsequent chapters of history, the Russians had not to fear that the
Oecumenical Patriarch’s jurisdiction over their church might be used at an effective
political lever either by the impotent Palaioldghi or by the infidel ’Osmanlis.

A new situation, however, was created in the North by the political partition of Russian
Orthodox Christendom between Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy and by the subsequent
secession of the Metropolitanate of Moscow from the Patriarchate or Constantinople
in a.d. 1441 (see pp. 398, below) and the establishment of an autocephalous Patriarchate of
Moscow in a.d. 1589 with a pretension to exercise jurisdiction over All Russia* and this
new situation was analogous to that which had arisen in the main body of Orthodox
Christendom in the ninth and tenth centuries as a result of the conversion of Bulgaria
to Orthodox Christianity. If the Orthodox Christian Russian populations under Polish
and Lithuanian sovereignty were to be transferred from the Oecumenical Patriarch’s
ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the new Patriarch of Moscow’s, the King of Poland-
Lithuania and his Orthodox Christian subjects of Russian nationality would then find
themselves, vis-a-vis the Tsar of Muscovy, in the position in which the Khan of Bul¬
garia had found himself vis-d-vis the East Roman Emperor. The Orthodox Christian
provinces of a sixteenth-century Poland-Lithuania lay as dangerously near to Moscow
as a ninth-century Bulgaria had lain to Constantinople; and a powerful Orthodox Tsar
of Muscovy who had the Patriarch of Moscow under his thumb might use the Patriarch
of Moscow’s pretension to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Russian Orthodox
Christians who were Polish and Lithuanian subjects as an effective instrument for

C litical interference in the affairs of a neighbouring state which he had strong motives
r undermining and dominating if he could.

» See Meyer, op. cit., p. 68j; Pichlcr, op. cit., p. 56; Mettetal, op. at., p. 23.

* See Pichler, op. cit., p. 60.

J See Mettetal. op. cit., p. 28. 4 See p. 128, above.

J See Mettetal, op. cit., p. 31. * Sec Mettetal, op. cit., p. 32*

? See Meyer, op. cit., p. 68s; Pichler, op. cit., p. 67; Rhcm6ris, op. cit., p. 17.

* Sec Pichler, op. cit., p. 69.

« On the 4th November, 1620, according to Meyer, op. cit., p. 687. Mettetal, op. cit.,
p. 63, and Rhcnidris. op. cit., p. 25, give the year as 1621.

154 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
fortune 1 that were as sharp as the tribulations of his predecessor Photius
and were due to the same cause as these. The similarity between the
careers of these two distinguished incumbents of the Oecumenical
Patriarchate is indeed striking. 2 Both patriarchs ventured to engage in
ecclesiastical warfare with the Roman Church; 3 each of them was ulti¬
mately at the mercy of an autocratic temporal sovereign to whom he was
doubly accountable as a subject who was at the same time also a public
servant ex officio munerispatriarchate ; and each, in his dealings both with
his Roman ecclesiastical adversaries and with his Constantinopolitan
sovereign lord, was betrayed by an opposition within the ranks of his
own Orthodox Christian community which played into his alien enemies’
hands.

The revolutionary feature in Loukaris’ policy was not, of course, his
anti-Roman stand. In this he was faithfully interpreting the contem¬
porary feelings of an overwhelming majority of his co-religionists under
Ottoman rule, and even his opponents within his own flock must have
secretly admired his boldness in defying Rome and have felt ashamed,
in their heart of hearts, of the timidity or self-interest that deterred them
from showing the same spirit. Nor had the Ottoman Government any
quarrel with Lodkaris on this account, for in Ottoman minds in this age
the Roman Church was identified with the Hapsburg Power, which was
the Ottoman Power’s Western arch-enemy both on the Danubian and
on the Mediterranean front. 4 The revolutionary policy that was Lodkaris’
unpardonable offence in the eyes of his Orthodox critics was his desire
for an entente with the Western Protestant secessionists from the ranks
of his and their Western Roman Catholic adversaries. 5 In these ‘Zealot’

i Loiikaris was banished in February 1623 (Pichler, op. cit., p. 113) and reinstated
in 1624 (p. 124); banished in October 1633 and quickly reinstated (p. 162); banished in
March 1634 ar.d reinstated in June 1634 (p. 162); banished in March 1635 and reinstated
in July 1636 (pp. 162-3).

J Photius's career has been touched upon in IV. iv. 606-7.

* In this connexion it should be mentioned that Pichler, one of the authorities cited
in this chapter, was a Roman Catholic.

* This traditional Ottoman hostility to Catholicism was a serious impediment to the
Constantinopolitan Jesuits who ultimately got rid of LoOkaris by persuading the Sultan
to have him executed. The first Jesuit mission in Constantinople established itself in
A.D. 1583-6 (Pichler, op. cit., p. tz6). In A.D. 1609 a second Jesuit mission was intro¬
duced under the auspices of the French (Pichler, op. cit., p. 117), who were personae
gratae to the ‘Osmanlis as being Roman Catholics who were nevertheless enemies of the
Hapsburgs. In a.d. 1628 the Jesuits were actually expelled by the Porte, at the instance
of the English and Venetian Ambassadors (Pichler, op. cit., p. 134; RhenUris. op. cit.,
p. 49), in the storm raised by the Ottoman authorities' seizure, at the Jesuits’ instigation,
of a Greek printing press that had been brought to Constantinople from England in
June 1627 by Nikddhimos Metaxis (see p. 164, n. 1, below). Nevertheless, the Jesuits
contrived, not only to find their way back to Constantinople, but to have a hand in the
taking of Lodkaris life (sec von Hammer, J.: Histoire de VEmpire Ottoman, French trans¬
lation, vol. ix (Paris 1837. Bcllizard, Barthis, Dufour, et Lowell), p. 306).

A pro-Loukaran pamphlet, published in a.d. 1633 as an appendix to a polemical work
against the Society of Jesus, and dealing with the Jesuits' intrigues against LnJkari*
at Constantinople in a.d. 1627 and 1628, is cited in Legrand, E.: Bibliographic UelUnique,
ou Description Raisomite des Ouvrages publics par des Grtcs au Dix-Seplientc Siicle, vol.
iii (Paris 1895, Picard), No. 706, pp. 87-88.

J Both the place and the time of Loukaris’ first attraction towards Western Protestant
ideas arc obscure. He was. of course, in political relations with Polish Protestants during
his sojourn in Poland-Lithuania during the years a.d. 1596-1601 (see p. 152, above),
but, a* we have seen, in this episode of history a common opposition to Roman Catholi¬
cism did not avail to bring the Orthodox and Protestant Christian communities in
Poland into communion with one another. Ixxikaris is alleged by some authorities to

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 155
Orthodox eyes the Protestants’ merit of being anti-Roman was quite
eclipsed by their crime of being still Western and therefore still, from an
Orthodox standpoint, schismatic; and, in the intricate encounter be¬
tween Loukaris, theConstantinopolitan Jesuits, the Orthodox Church in
the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Government, the Orthodox
opposition and the Padishah were as blind as the Jesuits were clear¬
sighted.

The unscrupulousness of the representations through which the
Jesuits cajoled the Sultan into putting Lotikaris to death was all of a
piece with their discernment in divining that, in seeking to redress the
balance between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Roman Catholicism
by attracting Protestantism into the Orthodox scale, Lotikaris had
conjured up a threat to the Tridcntine Roman Church which might be¬
come deadly if its author were to be allowed an opportunity of putting
this revolutionary Orthodox strategy into effect. 1 On the other hand,
Sultan Murad IV', in allowing himself to be persuaded to order the
execution of Loukaris in June 1638,* was less well advised than his
imperial predecessor the East Roman Emperor Basil I had been when
he had disposed of Photius by reinstating him, in a.d. 877, on his

have visited Wittenberg and Geneva (Pichler, op. cit., p. 62) and even France and
England (Mcttctal, op. cit., p. 23); and Pichler accepts the visits to Wittenberg and
Geneva as authentic, and conjectures that Lotikaris paid these two visits after his mission
in Poland, though he find* no evidence that Lotikaris ever travelled farther west than
Geneva (op. cit., p. 65). Meyer, on the other hand, believes (op. cit., p. 685) that the
alleged visits to Wittenberg and Geneva are also apocryphal, and that Lotikaris never
waited any of the Protestant centres in Western Christendom at any date—either after
his mission in Poland-Lithuania or during his previous sojourn in Venice and Padua.
He points out that there is no mention of any such visits in the original historical sources,
and that the legend of a visit to Geneva, in particular, is refuted by the absence of any
reference to it in a letter, recommending Leger to Lotikaris, that was written to Lotikaris
by the Genevan theologians in a.d. 1628.

The earliest indubitably authentic record of Lotikaris’ inclination towards Protestant¬
ism is in a letter written by Lotikaris himself, on the 6th September, 1618, to M. A. de
Dominis, in which he writes of his having made a three years’ study—presumably at
Constantinople—of Protestant theological works (the relevant passage from this letter
is quoted bv Meyer, op. cit., p. 685, from Legrand, E.: Bibliogrcphie HrUMque. ou
Description Raintmit det Outrages Publics par de Grets au XVII™ Sticle, vol. iv (Paris
1896, Picard), pp. 333-40). Lotikaris docs not say which three years these were; but
Meyer points out that on the 4th June, 1613, he was finding it necessary to defend him¬
self publicly against a charge of Lutheranism.

1 As Acting Oecumenical Patriarch, Lotikaris paid two visits, one in A.D. 1613 and
the second in a.d. 1616 (Pichler, op. cit., pp. 75 and 87) to Wallachia, an autonomous
Orthodox Christian principality under Ottoman suzerainty whose population was under
the Oecumenical Patriarebate's ecclesiastical jurisdiction. On his second visit he ex¬
horted the people of the city and see of Tergovishtc, and the prince of Wallachia, Radul,
to resist Roman Catholic propaganda (Pichler, op. cit., pp. 88 and 90). After his installa¬
tion on the Oecumenical Throne in a.d. 1620, Lotikaris issued an encyclical forbidding
his ecclesiastical subjects to have intercourse with Roman Catholics (Rhenidris, op. cit.,
p. 31). The Jesuits’ retort to this was to put up a rival candidate for the Patriarchal
Throne, and to bring about the first of Lotikaris’ successive banishments by persuading
the Ottoman Government to relegate him to Rhodes on the insinuation that he had been
intriguing with the Tuscan Government. Thereupon the Jesuits duly secured their own
candidate’s installation, but Lotikaris then obtained his first reinstatement through the
exertions of the English Ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe—after the anti-patriarch had
been compelled to retire to Mount Athos, in spite of the French Ambassador’s efforts
to keep him in office (Rhenidris, op. cit., pp. 31-36). In A.D. 1625 Lotikaris was
approached by the Vatican with an offer of its protection if he would publicly accept
the decisions of the Council of Florence and denounce Protestantism (Pichler, op. cit.,
p. 125; Rhenidris. op. cit., p. 38). Lotikaris left this overture unanswered (Rhenidris,
op. cit.. p. 40).

* See Pichler, op. cit., p. 177; Rhenidris, op. cit., p. 65.

156 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
patriarchal throne on the understanding that the policy which the re¬
installed patriarch would carry out thereafter would be his master’s and
not his own. The Sultan had not the Orthodox Opposition’s excuse for
letting himself be led into playing the Jesuits’ game, for there were no
traditional religious animosities or scruples to deter a Sunni Muslim
potentate from combating a Roman Catholic form of infidelity by un¬
leashing against it a Calvinist form of infidelity whose doctrine and
ethos had a marked affinity with those of Islam itself; and indeed in
Hungary', for a hundred years and more, it had been an axiom of Otto¬
man policy to champion a liberated Protestant minority against their
former Hapsburg Catholic oppressors.

Loukaris’ enemies contrived nevertheless to infuriate the Sultan with
the Patriarch by suggesting to Murad that Loukaris was politically
responsible for the piratical enterprises of his ecclesiastical subjects, the
Don Cossacks, against the Ottoman Empire. 1 In a.d. 16x5 the Don
Cossacks had made their first naval raid into the Bosphorus; 1 and in
a.d. 1638, on the eve of Sultan Murid IV’s departure from Constanti¬
nople on an Heraclian campaign to recover Asiatic Ottoman provinces
that had been overrun by the Persians, the news arrived that the Don
Cossacks had seized the strategically important Ottoman fortress of
Azov by a coup de main} Murid was struggling to retrieve the Ottoman
Empire from the anarchy into which it had lapsed since the death of
Suleyman the Magnificent, 4 and he was a man of demonic temperament.
In his exasperation at this unexpected and untimely military diversion
at a moment when it was imperative for him to concentrate all his
strength against the Safawl Power, he yielded impulsively to an insidious
suggestion that the Oecumenical Patriarch should be made the scapegoat
for a Cossack escapade which was not only out of the Patriarch’s control
de facto but was also beyond the limits of his responsibility de jure}

The action on Loukaris’ part that evoked the opposition to him among
his own Orthodox co-religionists was his rapprochement with the
Protestants with a view to a Protestant-Orthodox ecclesiastical union.
Loukaris proposed to base this union on the two parties’ common

1 For the Cossacks, sec II. ii. 155-7. P° r seventeenth-century eruption of the
Don Cossacks into the Black Sea, sec III. iii. 418 and 428.

2 See Allen, W. E. D.: The Ukraine, A History (Cambridge 1940, University Press),
p. 93.

1 See Pichlcr, op. cit., p. 176. * See V. vi. 207-8.

* Sultan Murad would have become aware of Loukaris’ innocence if he had paused
to take account of the difference between his respective jurisdictions and responsibilities
as Oecumenical Patriarch and as millet-bishy of the Ottoman Miliet-i-Rum. As the
ex officio political head of all Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule, including those
who were not within the Oecumenical Patriarchate’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the
Oecumenical Patriarch was in truth responsible to the Sultan for their loyalty to the
Ottoman Empire. On the other hand the Oecumenical Patriarch could not reasonably
be held accountable politically for the acts of Orthodox Christians who, like the Don
Cossacks, were not Ottoman subjects, even though they might be under the Oecumenical
Patriarch’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Since the establishment of an autocephalous
Patriarchate of Moscow in a.d. 1589 and the union of a majority of the Orthodox
Christian subjects of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania with the Roman Church in
a.d. 1594-6. the ecclesiastical jurisdiction which the Oecumenical Patriarch had pre¬
viously exercised over the whole of Russian Orthodox Christendom had contracted
almost to vanishing point. It was unlucky for Loukaris that the remnant of his Russian
flock happened to include Don Cossacks who made themselves obnoxious to Sultan
Murid at a critical moment in Murid’s as well as in Lovikaris' career.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 157
acceptance of the Scriptures and the Fathers and to safeguard this exist¬
ing basis by a mutual undertaking to make no innovations; 1 and in a.d.
1627 proposals to this effect—with the additional stipulation that either
party should retain its own existing rites, 2 provided that these were not
contrary to religion—arc said to have been laid before the Calvinist
doctors at Geneva by Mitrophdnis Kritdpoulos, 3 a disciple of Lotikaris’
who had been sent by Loukaris to England on an invitation from Abbott,
the Archbishop of Canterbury, and had spent seven years (a.d. 1617-24)
in the Protestant universities of Oxford and Helmstddt. 4 In a.d. 1629 a
Confessio was published in Loukaris’ name in Western Christendom; 5
and, after this had been denounced by Catholics as a forger)’, 6 Loukaris
is said to have made a public declaration that he was the author of it. 7
The cardinal points in Loukaris’ Confessio were the Calvinist doctrines of
justification by faith and the non-infallibility of the Church, with a conse¬
quent rejection of the Church’s pretension to have the last word in the
interpretation of the Scriptures. 8

Meanwhile, the tide had already turned against Loukaris’ policy of
an Orthodox-Calvinist common front. The Genevan doctors—if the
story that Mitrophdnis Kritdpoulos made proposals to them is true—had
proved unwilling to commit themselves without having first obtained

the statesmanlike

1 See Metietal, op. cit., p. 45.

* This mutual toleration of diverse rites was presumably inspired by i
provisions, on this point, of the Orthodox-Roman Catholic Union of
> 439 -

* Sec Mettetal, op. cit., pp. 76-77. The Roman Catholic authority, Pichlcr, op. cit.,
pp. 97-98, admits that Mitrophdnis Kritdpoulos visited Geneva in October 1627, but
discounts, as apocryphal, the story that on this occasion he brought with him formal
proposals for union. Kritdpoulo* certainly took sides against Loukaris at a later stage.
He signed the acts of the Synod of Constantinople that condemned Loukaris in a.d.
1638 (Meyer, op. cit..p. 689).

4 See Pichler, op. cit., pp. 92-941 RheniVris, op. cit., p. 24.

* Particulars of two Latin editions, four French editions, and one English and Latin
edition of I^dkaris’ Confettio , all published in Western Christendom in A.n. 1629, will
be found in Legrand, E.: Bibliolkf/jue HrlUnique, on Description Rationttie det Ouvraget
Publics par det Greet au Dix-Septtbne Slide, vol. i (Paris 1894, Picard), pp. 267-72.
According to Meyer, op. cit., p. 688, a German edition was also published in the same
year.

6 It is certain, nevertheless, that the Confettio is an authentic work of the Oecumenical
Patriarch in whose name it was published. On p. 8 of one of the two Latin editions of
A.D. 1629 (Legrand's No. 189) there appears, over the signature ‘Cornelius Haga,
Confoederatorum Belgic. Provinciarum pro tempore apud Portam Ottomanici Impera-
toris Orator’, the declaration: ‘Dcscripta fuit haec copia ex autographo, quod propria
Rcvcrendissimi Domini Patriarchae Cyrilli menu, quam optime cognosco, scriptum
penes me manet, et, per me fact® collatione, eum cum hoc ipso dc verbo ad verbum con-
venire, attestor.’ The Dutch Ambassador to the Porte might perhaps have written this in
error or in bad faith. There is, however, a Greek edition ot the Confettio, published at
Geneva in a.d. 1633 by Jean de Toumes (No. 224 in Legrand, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 315-
21), which was printed from a manuscript original in Lodkaris’ hand and bearing his
signature. This original manuscript was afterwards preserved in the public library at
Geneva, and a facsimile of the first sheet of it will be found in Legrand. op. cit., vol. cit.,
facing p. 218. In Legrand’s judgement (ibid., p. 318} the handwriting is identical with
that of other manuscripts known to be from Lodkaris' hand. There was an autograph
signed copy of the Greek text at Geneva in the same bundle as the original, and another
autograph signed copy at Leyden, in a.d. 1894, when thia volume of Legrand’s waa

P » See the Latin preface to the Geneva edition of the Greek text, quoted in Legrand,
op. cit., vol. i, p. 316; Pichler, op. cit.^j»p. 150 and 153

* See Pichler, op. cit.,
was an exposition of Ca'
(Meyer, op. cit., p. 688).

t., pp. 183-9; Mettetal, op. cit., p. 87. In genera! the Confettio
Calvinism in traditional Orthodox Christian theological terms

158 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the agreement of their co-religionists in Switzerland, Germany, Holland,
and England, 1 * while on the Orthodox side Yerasimos—Loukaris’ suc¬
cessor on the patriarchal throne of Alexandria, which, of all Orthodox
sees on Ottoman soil, was second only to the Oecumenical Patriarchate
itself in dignity and influence—had immediately come out in public as
the leader of a militant opposition. 1 Yerasimos was given his opportunity
by an overture from the Dutch Ambassador at Constantinople, who in
a.d. 1628 had brought from Geneva a Piedmontese Calvinist theologian,
Anton Leger, to propagate Calvinism among the Ottoman Orthodox
from a post of vantage as the Ambassador’s chaplain. 3 This overture
from the Calvinist side was rebuffed by Yerdsimos in a public pro¬
nouncement on the 8th July, 1629. 4 The Patriarch of Alexandria re¬
jected the pica for an Orthodox-Protestant common front against Roman
Catholicism and denounced the translation of the Bible into the vernacu¬
lar 5 on the ground that God’s revelation was intentionally obscure and
that it was more important to ensure that the faithful should remain
Orthodox than that the Scriptures should be made intelligible. 6 ‘The
seamless robe of Christ . . . would be torn into a thousand pieces by
the Occidentals.’ 7 A castigation of 'the Confessio circulated in Cyril the
Patriarch of Constantinople’s name’, by John Matthew Karyophillis,
the Orthodox Archbishop of Qonlych, was published at Rome in Latin
in a.d. 1631 and in Greek, in two versions, in a.d. 1632, and this polemic
was dedicated by its Orthodox author to Pope Urban VIII. 8

This counter-attack on Loukaris within his own camp when he was
alive and in occupation of the Oecumenical Throne was vigorously
followed up after his final disgrace and death. On the 27th September,
1639, the dead Oecumenical Patriarch was anathematized 9 by a synod
which had been convened at Constantinople by Cyril Kdndaris, the
Orthodox Bishop of Bercea, 10 and which was attended by three Patriarchs,
including Loukaris’ disciple Mitrophdnis Kritdpoulos—now Patriarch
of Alexandria. 11 This act was confirmed by a Graeco-Russian synod
convened at Jassy, under the presidency of the Oecumenical Patriarch

1 See Mettctal, op. tit., p. 77.

1 For this opposition, sec Meyer, op. cit., p. 688.

J Sec Meyer, op. cit., p. 688 ; Pichlcr, op. cit., p. 143; Rhcni^ris, op. cit., pp. 51-52.
Leger stayed at Constantinople till a.d. 1636.

* Sec Meyer, op. tit., p. 689; Pichler, op. tit„p. 144; Mettctal, op. cit., p. 78.

J The Elxcvir edition of the Greek text of the Gospels was translated from the Attic
KOiyr] into the Modern Greek 817/1071*7 on Loukaris’ orders at Leger’* instance (RhenUris,
op. cit., p. 53), though it did not reach Constantinople from Geneva, where it had been
published in a.d. 1638, till after Lodkaris' death (Meyer, op. cit., p. 688). This was
perhaps the first shot fired in a Modem Greek cultural civil war on tnc issue raised by
Linguistic Archaism (see V. vi. 68-71).

6 See Pichler, op. cit., pp. X45-6. It is significant that similar sentiments had once
been expressed by Lodkaris. In a letter of the 30th May, i6« 2, to a Dutch correspondent,
J. Uytcnbogaert (Wtenbogaert), he had declared that the ruin of Greek education by
the Turks had brought with it one benefit, at any rate: it had safeguarded the Greeks
against heresy (Pichler, op. cit., p. 72).

7 Quoted in Mcttetal, op. cit, p. 79.

8 See Legrand, op. cit., vol. i. No. 209 (pp. 2SS-9) and Nos. 216-17 <PP> 304-6).

9 See Pichler, op. cit., pp. 217 and 226; Mettctal, op. cit., p. 102. Meyer, op. cit.,
p. 680, gives the date of the Synod’s findings as a.d. 1638.

to See Rhcni6ris, op. tit., p. 59: Pichler, op. cit, p. axe. Kdndaris was an alumnus of
the Jesuit College founded at Galata in a.d. x6oi (Rhemiris, op. tit., p. 19).

11 See Pichler, op. tit., p. 216; Meyer, op. cit, p. 689.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 159
Parthenios’s legates, in a.d. 1642, 1 and thereafter by a synod convened at
Jerusalem in a.d. 1672* which was bitterly anti-Calvinist in its pro¬
nouncements 3 but was not widely representative of Orthodoxy in its
membership, since, apart from two Russian monks, it was not attended
by any fathers not belonging to the hierarchy of the Patriarchate of
Jerusalem itself. 4 The final blow was struck at a synod held in Constan¬
tinople in a.d. 1 691. 5

If Loukaris had succeeded in persuading his Orthodox flock and his
Calvinist friends to enter into an ecclesiastical union with one another
under the presidency of the Oecumenical Patriarchate, he would have
anticipated, by nearly three hundred years, Stalin’s feat of appropriating
a Western heresy to serve as a new weapon against the prevailing Western
orthodoxy of the day. And who can say what the consequences might
have been if, instead of putting Loukaris to death, Sultan Murad had
had the wit to follow up a traditionally philo-Protcstant Ottoman policy
by taking a philo-Protestant Oecumenical Patriarch under his imperial
patronage? In its predestinarianism and in its rejection of ‘priestcraft’
and ‘image-worship’—two traditional Christian institutions that were
Orthodox as well as Catholic—Calvinism had a decidedly greater affinity
with Islam than with Orthodox Christianity; 6 and, if the Orthodox
Church in the Ottoman Empire had gone Calvinist in doctrine and 6thos
as a sequel to a mariage de convenance with the Calvinist churches of
Western Europe, the intellectual and moral gulf between the Orthodox
Christian and the Muslim subjects of the Padishah would have been
appreciably diminished—instead of being accentuated, as it actually was,
when, in the next chapter of the story, the Orthodox Christian subjects
of the Ottoman Empire succumbed to the attraction of the Modern
Western culture in its latter-day secular form. If Cyril Lotikaris had had

' See Mevcr. op. cit., p. 689; Rheniiris, op. dt, p. 73 - The Greek text of the decree
of this synod, condemning the Confessio, was published at Jassy on the 20th December,
164a (Old Style) (Lcgrand, op. cit., vol. iii, No. 708, p. 89), and was republished, together
with a Latin translation, in A.D. 1643, hy Sebnstien Cramoisy, Printer to the King of
France (Lcgrand, op. cit., vol. i. No. 337, pp. 4 SO->)- The Corifeuio itself, together with
the texts of both the Bishop of Bercra’s and the Oecumenical Patriarch’s synodal stric¬
tures, all in both Greek and Latin, was published in A.D. 1645 (Lcgrand, op. cit., vol.

assy is erroneously dated, not a.d. 1642, but a.d. 1644, by N. Jorga:
Geschichie des Osmaniuhen Roches, vol. iv (Gotha 1911, Perthes), p. 30. Mettetal, op.
cit., pp. 103-4. records a synod held at Constantinople in a.d. 1643 a * the instance of
Basil Prince of Moldavia and attended by the Metropolitan of Kiev. As this Synod of
Constantinople ia not mentioned by any of the other authorities, it is possible that it is
an erroneous description of the synod actually held in a.d. 1642 at Jassy—unless the
participants in the proceedings at Jassy subsequently adjourned to Constantinople.

1 For this synod of Jerusalem see Pichler, op. cit., pp. 230-5*. Mettetal, op. cit.,
p. 106; Rhenidris, op. cit., n. 75. Anti-Western though it was, it was nevertheless a by¬
product of a Western religious controversy. In a dispute about Lodkaris between the
French Huguenots and Port Royal, the Huguenots had boasted that the Orthodox
Church was Calvinist, and the French Ambassador at Constantinople, dc Nointel, had
asked the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Dositheos, for an explanation. The synod
of Jerusalem implied, in its findings, that Lodkaris was not the author of the Confesno
attributed to him (Pichler, op. dt., p. 230). A pair of polemics against Calvinism by
Meletios righos, one of the two patriarchal legates at Jassy in a.d. 1642, and by Dosi¬
theos, were published at Bucarest in a.d. 1690 (Legrand, op. cit., vol. ii. No. 632, pp.
458 - 473 ). 5 Se * Pichler. op. cit., p. 235.

* See Pichler, op. dt., p. 233. 5 See Meyer, op. at., p. 689.

* On this point ace Arnold, T. W.: The Preaching of hlam, and ed. (London 1913.
Constable), p. 163.

11, No. 272, p. 14)
The Synod of J

160 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
* his way, it is conceivable that the trial of strength between the Ottoman
Power and the Danubian Hapsburg Power in a.d. 1682-3 wight have
ended in the discomfiture of Roman Catholicism by the united forces of
an Islam and an Orthodoxy that had made contact with one another
across a Calvinist bridge.

This possible outcome of Loukaris’ policy was ruled out by the com¬
bined effects of Jesuit ability, Ottoman blindness, and Orthodox fanati¬
cism. By what lengths Lotikaris actually fell short of winning over a
majority of his Orthodox co-religionists to his Calvinizing policy it is
difficultto judge, 1 but it is significant that the 'Zealot' spirit which defeated
a Loukaris in the early decades of the seventeenth century was still
strong enough in the middle decades of the eighteenth century to baffle
a Votilgharis.

The Frustration of Evybiios Voulgharis

Evydnios Vodlgharis 2 (vivebat a.d. 1716-1806) was a Greek philoso¬
pher-educationalist whose impeccable Orthodoxy 3 did not atone, in
contemporary ecclesiastical Greek Orthodox eyes, for his offences of
advocating religious toleration and educational reform and cultivating
contemporary Western philosophy. On these accounts, Voulgharis was
driven from pillar to post. The hostility of the conservative headmaster
of a rival school at Ydnnina forced him to relinquish his own school there
and retreat to Kdzhani. An opportunity that had been opened to him by
the foundation of a new academy on Mount Athos was closed, after he
had taught there for six years, by the dissolution of the academy at the
instance of the ex-Oecumenical Patriarch Cyril, who, unfortunately for
Votilgharis, was then living in retirement on the Holy Mountain; and,
after he had had the further disappointment of being forced out of a post
to which he had been appointed at the Patriarchal Academy in Constanti¬
nople, Voulgharis accepted, in a.d. 1775, an invitation from a Petrine

1 Evidence suggesting that Lotikaris’ following among his own flock was not in¬
considerable is presented by Sir Thomas Arnold in op. cit., pp. 163-4. He points out
that Lotikaris’ Con/tssio was adopted by a synod of his Orthodox supporters (cp. Pichler,
op. cit., pp. 181 and 228); argues that the very vigour of the opposition, and vehemence
of their denunciations, testify to a fear on their part that Loukaris’ party might win
the day; and discounts, as tendentious, the picture of Lotikaris, drawn bv his Orthodox
opponents, as an isolated figure playing a lone hand (for this picture, see Pichler, op. cit.,
pp. 211 and 227, and Mettetal, op. cit., p. 101). On the other hand, Mcttetal (op. cit.,
p. 91) estimates that the Confessio was received by the Greeks with apathy, and Loukaris
himself once wrote, in a letter to David le Leu dc Wilhem, a Dutch statesman with whom
he was in correspondence in the years a.d. 1618-20: ‘Io se puotesse riformarc la mia
chiesa, lo farei molto volcnticri, ma Iddio sa che Iraclalur de impostibili' (Lcgrand,
op. cit., vol. iv, p. 326, Doc. 109).

* For Voulgharis' career, see Thereiands, D.: Adhamdndios Korais (Trieste 1889-
1890, Austrian Lloyd Press, 3 vols.), vol. i, p. 64, and Finlay, G.: A History of Greece,
B.c. 146 to a.d. 1864 (Oxford 1877, Clarendon Press, 7 vols.), vol. v, pp. 284-c.

* VovSlgharis gave evidence of his Orthodox piety in publishing for one of the Phana-
riot Princes of the House of Ghika, Gregory II (in Moldavia funrebatur a.d. 1764-6 et
A.n. 1774-7: •" Wallaehu f a.d. 1768-74), an edition of the Evoc&evra of Vrydnr.ios— a
Byzantine work vindicating the authenticity of miracles—and in eschewing, out of a
religious scruple, the new-fangled use of the word 'EXXtjv in the sense of an adherent
of the living Orthodox Christian Modem Greek nationality in lieu of its traditional usage
in the sense of an adherent of the dead pagan Hellenic Civilization (Thereiands, D.:
Adhamdndiot Korais (Trieste 1889-90, Austrian Lloyd Press, 3 vols.), vol. i, pp. 73-75
and 66).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 161
Russian Imperial Government which appreciated his qualifications and
turned them to good account by making him bishop of the new See of
Slavonia and Kherson in territory recently acquired by Russia from the
Ottoman Empire in the northern hinterland of the Black Sea.

Voulgharis’ Zealot Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical persecutors were
not even content with having thus hounded him out of the domain of
Greek Orthodox Christendom. In a.d. 1798 the Greek press at Con¬
stantinople published a counterblast, by the Patriarch of Jerusalem,
Anthimos, to a tract written by Votilgharis in favour of religious tolera¬
tion, and this eighteenth-century fulmination still breathed the authentic
spirit of fifteenth-century Orthodox fanaticism. The Patriarch told his
readers that

‘when the last emperors of Constantinople began to subject the Oriental
Church to Papal thraldom, the particular favour of Heaven raised up the
Othoman Empire to protect the Greeks against heresy, to be a barrier
against the political power of the Western nations, and to be the champion
of the Orthodox Church.’ 1

The Revolution in the Ottoman Orthodox Christians' Attitude towards the
West

This classic exposition of a traditional ‘Zealot’ thesis was, however, no
more than a parting shot in a losing cultural battle which had taken its
decisive turn more than a hundred years before the close of the eighteenth
century. 2 In the cultural tug-of-war, for the captivation of Greek, Serb,
and Rumanian Orthodox Christian souls, between the Ottoman masters
of these ra'iyeh and their Western neighbours, the West had won be¬
fore the seventeenth century was over. The date of this transfer of
the Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh 's cultural allegiance can be established,
within rather narrow limits, by the at first sight superficial, yet neverthe¬
less psychologically significant, index of changes in fashions of dress,
and this sartorial testimony is corroborated by evidence in the religious
field. At the same date, conversions of Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh to
Islam virtually ceased, and unconverted Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh for
the first time showed a preference for Hapsburg over Ottoman rule.

In the seventh decade of the seventeenth century, Ottomanization was
still the goal of the ra'iyeh 's social ambition, as was observed by the

> Finlay, op. cit., vol. cit., loc. cit.

2 The waning power of the Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy, which had still
just availed to frustrate Votilgharis, proved impotent against his intellectual successor
Korais, though the life-times of these two Greek apostles of the Western culture over¬
lapped. Korals, too, in his day, had to defend himself against charges ofjmpiety accord¬
ing to a letter published in Komis, Adhamlndios: ’Anav 9 iafUi 'EmrrroX&v (Athens 1S39,
Rhdllis), p. 2«6; and, from the clerical standpoint, these charges could perhaps be sub¬
stantiated on the testimony of Korais’ own written words. 'Rebuild your schools not only
before your country houses but before your churches’, he wrote to the Chiots.on the
morrow of the catastrophe of a.d. 1822 (letter of the 12th October, 1822, in' ArravOur/ia,
pp. 45-47). 'Monastic estates (ficriyia) are an incentive to idleness and ought to be
abolished' (the same letter, in AndvOiopa, p. 49). In a letter of the 4th July, 1823, on the
constitution of the new Greek national state, Korais prescribes that the ecclesiastical
authorities ought to be elected by the laity and to be debarred from participation in
politics (‘Avdy 0 ia/ta, p. 257)—a French Revolutionary theory that was utterly sub¬
versive of the established Ottoman institution of the Mtllet-i-Rum. Votilgharis had been
censured and thwarted for offences that bore no comparison with these enormities.

B 28SS.VIU G

x62 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
shrewd secretary of the English Embassy at Constantinople, Sir Paul
Rycaut:

‘It is worth a wise man’s observation how gladly the Greeks and Arme¬
nian Christians imitate the Turkish habit, and come as near to it as they
dare; and how proud they arc when they are privileged upon some extra¬
ordinary occasion to appear without their Christian distinction.’ 1

On the other hand, Demetrius Cantemir, the Ruman grandee who was
appointed Prince of Moldavia by the Porte in November 1710* and
deserted to Peter the Great when the Tsar invaded Moldavia in 1711,*
is represented in a contemporary portrait wearing a bag wig, coat and
waistcoat, and rapier; and, though in this portrait Cantemir’s Ottoman
antecedents arc still betrayed by a turban superimposed on his wig and
by a dagger thrust into his girdle to supplement the rapier at his hip, 4
these relics of Ottomanism no longer figure in the frontispiece to an
English translation, published in 1734-5, of Cantemir's history of the
Ottoman Empire. 5 Nor were there any tell-tale Ottoman accessories in
the portraits, painted at Pest or Vienna somewhat later in the eighteenth
century, to judge by the cut of the coats and the style of the wigs, which,
on the 5th-6th September, 1921, the writer of this Study saw still
hanging on the panelled walls of houses in the South-West Macedonian
Greek townlet of Shdtishta to commemorate the overland trade with
the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy and Saxony that was opened up in
the eighteenth century by more than one enterprising Rumeliot Greek
Orthodox Christian community. 6

These changes in style of dress were, of course, outward visible signs
of corresponding changes in cast of mind. Demetrius Cantemir, for
example, could read and write Latin, Italian, and French, as well as his
Rumanian mother tongue, the Modem and Attic Greek and the Old
Slavonic that were his Orthodox Christian cultural heritage, and the
Turkish, Persian, and Arabic that were his cultural stock in trade as an
Ottoman officer of state; and, after his desertion to the Russian camp,
he added the Russian language to his repertory. 7 His history of the
Ottoman Empire, written in Latin and published in French and English
simultaneously, was perhaps the first to be presented by an Ottoman
subject in the Western manner. The Rumanian Cantemir’s older Greek
contemporary Alexander Mavrogordato, 8 who was appointed in A.D.

* Rycaut, Sir P.: The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London 1668, Starkey
and Brome). p. 82. The sixteenth-century Greek Orthodox Christian residents in the
centres of business in Western Christendom 'wore the dress and assumed the manners
of Turks; for they found that in Western Europe they were more respected in the
character of Ottoman subjects than as schismatic Greeks’ (Finlay, G.: A History of
Greece, b.C. 146-A.D. 1S64, vol. v (Oxford 1877. Clarendon Press), pp. 156-7).

* Sec Jorga, N.: Gesehichte ties Osmanischen Reiches, vol. iv (Gotha 191 x, Perthes),

p. 304.

5 See II. ii. 225, n. x. * Sec Jorga, op. cit., vol. tit., pp. 363-4.

5 Cantemir, Demetrius: The History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire,
written originally in Latin, translated into English from the author’s own manuscript—
‘communicated to the translator by his son. Prince Antiochus Cantemir, Minister
Plenipotentiary from the Czarina to his present Majesty King George’—by N. Tindal,
M.A., Vicar of Great Waltham in Essex (London 1734-5. Knapton, 2 parts).

6 For this overland trade, see pp. 18c—2, below.

» See Jorga, op. cit., vol. cit., loc. cit.; Tindal’s translation of Cantemir, op. cit., part
ii, p. 460. » See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 242; Jorga, op. cit., vol. xv, p. 283.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 163
1673 to be the second incumbent of the recently created office of Drago¬
man of the Porte 1 and who eventually extricated the Ottoman Empire
from the disastrous war of a . d . 1682-99 by negotiating the peace settle¬
ment of Carlowitz, likewise knew Latin, Italian, and French as well
as Greek, ‘Slav’, 1 Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, and likewise won the
freedom of a Modem Western republic of letters. 3

The Phanariot Greek Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman public
service 4 continued to study the classical languages and literatures of the
Islamic culture down to the eve of the Greek national uprising of a.d.
1821, and this not merely on account of their utility, but for the sake of
their prestige and their intrinsic attractiveness.

'The Phanariots were attentive to education and applied themselves to
literary studies, especially the Turkish language, as being superior to
others,’

writes one of the fathers of the Greek Revolution in his memoirs. 5 But
the qualification which gave the seventeenth-century and eighteenth-
century Phanariots their value in the eyes of their Turkish employers
was their familiarity, not with Ottoman, but with Western life and
letters in an age in which the Ottoman Government had to find compe¬
tent representatives to negotiate diplomatically with Western Powers
whom it cculd no longer simply defeat in the field 6 —in striking contrast
to the Sultans’ attitude in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth cen¬
turies of the Christian Era, when they had conscripted an Hite of their
Orthodox Christian subjects into their Slave-Household in order to fit
them, by a totalitarian Ottoman education, to govern the Ottoman
Empire as professional administrators and to extend its bounds as
professional soldiers. 7

The generation which saw the Ottoman Government begin to appre¬
ciate in their Orthodox Christian subjects a familiarity with the Modern
West, which these ra'iyeh would not have acquired if they had been
transformed into qullar, was likewise the generation which saw the vir¬
tual end of a process of voluntary conversion of Orthodox Christian
ra'iyeh to Islam that had been in progress since the fourteenth century
and had been one of the secrets of the ‘Osmanlis’ amazing political
success. Even the Orthodox Christian ‘tribute children’ who were
educated to be the rulers of the Ottoman Empire became Muslims—
as they invariably did—by choice and not by compulsion; 8 and in
general the Ottoman regime in the Orthodox Christian World was as
scrupulous as the Umayyad regime had been in the Syriac World in

1 This office had been created by the Grand Vizier Ahmed KbprGlQ in A.D. 1660.

* This vague term 'Slav’ might mean either the ninth-century Macedonian Slav
dialect which had become the liturgical language of the Slavonic-speaking and Rumanian¬
speaking Orthodox Christian peoples under the name of 'Old Slavonic', or it might
mean one of the living vernacular Slav languages, e.g. Serbo-Croat.

3 Mavrogordito’s contribution to Western literature was a treatise on the seventeenth-
century Western scientific discovery of the circulation of the blood (sec p. 137, n. 8,
below). < _ * See II. ii. 222;-8.

3 Khrysanthdpoulos, Ph.: AtTopvrjuavtvfiaTa ntpl riji 'EMynKi/s ’Enavaordotejs
(Athens 1899, Sakcllarios, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 37 -

* On this point, see II. ii. 224.

7 The classical Ottoman system of education has been described in III. iii. 22-30.

* See III. iii. 37 , n. x.

164 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
abiding by the Prophet Muhammad’s injunction that non-Muslim
'People of the Book’ were to be allowed to practise their ancestral reli¬
gions under Muslim rule in consideration of the payment of a surtax. 1
After the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a Western Chris¬
tian who had spent twenty-two years in captivity in Ottoman hands
testified that the ‘Osmanlis ‘compelled no one to renounce his faith’; 1
and, in the judgement of a judicious Modern Western student of the
history of the Greeks under Ottoman rule,

‘we find that many Greeks of high talent and moral character were so
sensible of the superiority of the Mohammadans that, even when they
escaped being drafted into the Sultan’s household as tribute-children,
they voluntarily embraced the faith of Mahomet. The moral superiority
of Ottoman society must be allowed to have had as much weight in causing
these conversions, which were numerous in the fifteenth century, as the
personal ambition of individuals.’ 3

‘Towards the middle of the seventeenth century . . . the number of
[Greek] renegades from among the middle and lower orders of society is
said to have been more considerable than at any other time.’ 4 In Crete,
the last Greek Orthodox Christian country to be acquired by the
‘Osmanlis, the conquest achieved in the long-drawn-out Veneto-Ottoman
War of Candia (gerebatur a . d . 1645-69) was followed by conversions 5
which, in both their spontaneity and their numbers, were as impressive
as any recorded in the heyday of the Ottoman Power; and the Greeks
were not alone among the Orthodox Christian ra’iyeh in continuing to
be susceptible to the attractions of Islam down to this date. A com¬
munity of Bulgar Orthodox Christian highlanders in the Rhodope, who
came to be known, after their apostasy, as Pomaks, were converted to
Islam between a . d . 1656 and a . d . 1661; and among the Albanians the
proportion of Muslims in the population seems to have risen from not
more than 10 per cent, to more than 50 per cent, between a . d . 1610 and
the close of the seventeenth century. 6

While the descendants of these seventeenth-century Albanian con¬
verts betrayed mental reservations by adopting Islam in the crypto-Shi'I
form of Bcktashism, 7 the descendants of the contemporary Pomak and

1 See the evidence presented in V. vi. 203-5. It is also noteworthy that, after the
seizure, on the 4th January, 1628, by the Janissaries, at the Jesuits’ instigation, of a
printing-press which had been brought to Constantinople from England in a.d. 1627
by Nikbahimos Mctaxis, the Sheykh-el-Isl 4 m gave the opinion that Christian sub¬
jects of the Porte had a right to publish controversial religious literature. It must be
added that this ruling did not secure the restitution of the press, though it did secure
the temporary banishment of the Jesuits. (For this incident, see Pichler, op. cit., pp.
127-34; Rhenibris, op. cit., pp. 43-S). During the remainder of the seventeenth century
the only ra'iyeh permitted to have u printing press at Constantinople were the Jews.
As late as A.D. 1698 the Armenians were estopped from using a press which they had
imported from Venice. The first press for printing Turkish (of course, in the Arabic
Alphabet) was established in Constantinople in a.d. 1727 by the Grand Vizier Ibrahim,
who was a Hungarian renegade (Pichler, op. cit., pp. 137-8).

1 AuctorAnonymua: Turchieat Spurcitiae Suggillatio et Con/ufo/io (Paris 1514, Badius),
fol. xvii (a) in the edition of 1516, quoted in Arnold, op. cit., p. 157.

> Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 29.

4 Arnold, op. cit., p. 165, citing Scheffler, J.: TQrchcn-Schrift: von der Unachen der
TUrckuchen Utbtrziehung and der Zerlrelung dei Volckci Golles (1664), §§ 53-6, and Fin¬
lay, op. cit., vol. v, pp. 1*8-19.

* For details, see Arnold, op. cit., pp. 153 and 201-5.

6 See Arnold, op. cit., pp. 177-92, especially p. 180.

7 See V. v. 295.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 165
Cretan converts displayed the zeal for which their kind are notorious,
and survived to give proof of their sincerity in the twentieth century of
the Christian Era by choosing to lose their ancestral homes and settle
among their Turkish-speaking co-religionists in Anatolia rather than
avoid exile by re-embracing the faith of their forefathers whose mother
tongue they had never ceased to speak. The seventeenth-century mass
conversions of Albanians and Rhodopaean Bulgars, however, unlike
those of contemporary Cretans, occurred in new circumstances which
portended a change. They appear to have been to a large extent the
psychological reaction to a disillusionment experienced by Christian
barbarians in fastnesses who had found their ‘Osmanli masters still too
strong for them when they had prematurely attempted to shake off the
Ottoman yoke by force during the temporary lapse of the Ottoman
Empire between the death of Suleym 5 n the Magnificent in a . d . 1566
and the advent of the saviour Mehmed Koprulii to power in a . d . 1656.*
Thereafter, conversions virtually ceased.

‘In the eighteenth century, when the condition of the Christians was
worse than at any other period, we find hardly any mention of conversions
at all, and the Turks themselves arc represented as utterly indifferent to
the progress of their religion and considerably infected with scepticism
and unbelief.’ 2

The Revolution in the West's Attitude towards Orthodox Christianity

The sufferings of the Orthodox Christian subjects of the Ottoman
Porte in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era were due, not to
religious persecution—as is witnessed by the fact that in this age the
Porte’s Muslim subjects suffered equally—but to the misgovernment
of the Ottoman Empire during its final lapse towards dissolution after the
rally that had been led by the House of Koprulii . 3 By contrast, the
religious scepticism and unbelief that infected Western Christendom in
the same generation was accompanied by an advance in administrative
efficiency and a dawn of political enlightenment. The consequent new
Western outlook revealed itself in a sudden conversion of the Danubian
Hapsburg Monarchy from a Spanish-minded Roman Catholic intoler¬
ance towards its Protestant subjects and its Orthodox Christian neigh¬
bours to a standard of religious toleration that could compare not
unfavourably with the Islamic standard of a contemporary' Ottoman
rdgime; and this moral revolution in Hapsburg counsels evoked a politi¬
cal revolution in Protestant and Orthodox hearts.

‘The Calvinists of Hungary and Transylvania and the Unitarians of the
latter country’ had 'long preferred to submit to the Turks rather than fall
into the hands of the fanatical House of Hapsburg, and,’ as late as the

I The insurgent Rhodopaean Bulgars were subjugated and converted bv the Grand
Vizier Mehmed KoprillQ (fuKgebatur a.d. 1656-61). Apostasies of Roman Catholic (not
Orthodox) Albanians on the rebound from two unsuccessful insurrections in the fourth
and fifth decades of the seventeenth century arc noticed in Arnold, op. cit., pp. 188-9.
While some of these Catholic apostates opted for Islam, others opted for Orthodoxy.
The Orthodox Christian Albanian warriors who seized the fastness of Suli in the last
quarter of the seventeenth century succeeded in holding their own till they were over¬
powered by ‘All Pasha of Yinnina in a.d. 1803.

* Arnold, op. cit., p. 154. 2 See V. vi. 208-9 299-300-

166 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

seventh decade of the seventeenth century*, ‘the Protestants of Silesia 1
looked with longing eyes towards Turkey, and would gladly have pur¬
chased religious freedom at the price of submission to the Muslim rule.’ 2

The Silesian Protestants’ pro-Ottoman proclivities evoked the follow¬
ing lament from a Western observer in a book published in a.d. 1664:

‘I hear with great astonishment and consternation that it is not only
among the common people that remarks like these go the round: "Life
under the Turks is not so bad either; one has only to give a ducat per
head, and one would be free”; item, "The Turk leaves religion free; one
would recover possession of the churches”; and the like. I also hear that
others, who ought to have known better, take pleasure in such talk and
rejoice at the thought of their own undoing ( iiber ihr eigen Ungliick
frolocken ).' 3

The extent of the Danubian Hapsburg Government’s change of
policy, if not of heart, within the next twenty-five years is revealed in
their dealings with the Serbs 4 when, in the first rebound from the failure
of Ottoman arms to take Vienna in the siege of a.d. 1682-3, Hapsburg
armies broke into the domain of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom
and, momentarily penetrating as far south-eastward as Old Serbia, suc¬
ceeded in a.d. 1689 in occupying Pc<f, the seat of an autocephalous Serb
Patriarchate that had been re-established in a.d. 1557 by the Porte at
the instance of a Serb-born Grand Vizier, Mehmed Sdkdllii. 5

The first reaction of the Ottoman Padishah’s Orthodox Christian sub¬
jects to the advent of these new schismatic Western Christian Crusaders
was apprehensive and hostile.

‘The most striking feature of the appeals to Russia from the Balkan
Orthodox is that they were directed quite as much against Catholic
Austria as against Muslim Turkey—which did not seek proselytes. The
[orthodox] Metropolitan of Skoplje [Oskiib], who made his way to Mos¬
cow in a.d. 1687, inveighed against the dangers of Austrian domination
and the ill-treatment of refugee Serbian bishops in Hungary. He was
followed next year by Isaiah, Archimandrite of St. Paul’s Monastery on
Athos, imploring Russia to save the Orthodox from Latin as well as
Muslim conquerors, and bringing appeals for help not only from Constan¬
tinople and Sherban Cantacuzene, hospodar of Wallachia, but as well
from Arsenius [Arscnijc III] Kmojevid, the Serbian Patriarch of Pe <5
[Ipek ].’ 6

Thereafter, however, a touch of adversity brought home to Franks and
Serbs alike the expediency of making common cause. When the tide of
war turned again in the ‘Osmanlis’ favour, as it quickly did, the reign-

1 Silesia had come under Hapsburg rule in a.d. 1526, together with the rest of the
Bohemian crown lands (see II. ii. 179). It remained under Hapsburg rule till all but a
fragment of it was conquered by Frederick the Great in the War of the Austrian Suc¬
cession ( grrebalur A.D. 1740-8).—A.J.T.

a Arnold, op. cit., pp. IS5-6.

J Schcfiicr, op. cit., § 48, quoted in Arnold, op. cit., p. 156, n. 1.

* The following account is based on Hadrovics, L.: L’£glue Serbe sous la Domination
Turque (Paris 1947, Presses Universitaires de France), pp. 135-46.

* See III. iii. 40, n. 1, and IV. iv. 622, n. 6.

6 Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire (Oxford 1949, Blackwell),
P- 34 -

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 167
ing Patriarch Arsenije III committed himself to the Hapsburg cause
by encouraging the Serb and Albanian Orthodox Christians under his
ecclesiastical jurisdiction to enlist under the Hapsburg flag; and on the
6th April, 1690, on the advice of Thomas Raspassani—a Franciscan
friar who was vicar of the vacant Roman Catholic episcopal see of Scupi
(Skoplje, Oskub)—the Emperor Leopold published a proclamation to all
Christian peoples formerly subject to the Hungarian Crown, and to all
other Christian peoples now under Ottoman rule, declaring his inten¬
tion to liberate them, inviting them to take up arms in his cause, and
promising them, after liberation, entire religious liberty and a juridical
status in accordance with their desires, including the rights of freely
electing a prince of their own and of paying no other taxes than those
that had been in force before the Ottoman conquest. 1 This proclama¬
tion was accompanied by a personal letter of the same date from the
Emperor to the Serb Patriarch.

Later in the same year, when, under continuing Ottoman pressure,
the Hapsburg armies were compelled to fall back on the Danube, the
Patriarch Arsenije evacuated the abandoned territory with them at the
head of some seventy thousand or more Serb Orthodox Christian
refugees, 1 and a meeting of Serb prelates and lay notables, held at
Belgrade, offered their political allegiance to the Hapsburg Crown on
condition that in Serb-inhabited territories enumerated by them—some
of which were at that moment in Hapsburg, and others in Ottoman,
hands—the Hapsburg Government should guarantee to the Serb com¬
munity the enjoyment of a communal autonomy under the presidency
of an archbishop of Serb descent and mother-tongue and of the Greek
Orthodox Christian rite who was to be elected by a mixed ecclesiastical
and lay assembly. This offer of Serb allegiance, on the basis of these
Serb stipulations, was accepted by the Emperor Leopold in a diploma
of the 21st August, 1690, followed up by letters patent of the 20th
August, 1691, and a confirmatory diploma of the 4th March, 1695.

In this political bargain between the Hapsburg Monarchy and the
Serb refugees in territory under Hapsburg rule, what the Serbs were
demanding and the Monarchy was granting in substance was that an
Orthodox Christian people under the dominion, and in the territory, of
a Western Power should continue to enjoy a non-territorial communal
autonomy on the temporal as well as the ecclesiastical plane which it had
previously enjoyed as a millet of the Ottoman Empire, 3 but which was at
variance with the Modern Western political principle of territorial

1 This undiscriminating appeal by a representative of one Christian denomination
to representatives of all Christian denominations was a new departure in Western
history, and it is significant that the cue thus given in a.D. 1690 by a Catholic Hapsburg
Emperor was followed by an Orthodox Romanov Emperor in A.D. 17x1. In the pro¬
clamation to the Ottoman Christians which Peter the Great issued in March 1711, on
the eve of his invasion of Moldavia (sec p. 127, n. 3, above), the Tsar, like his Caesarean
Majesty, ‘came forward avowedly as the liberator of the Christians, Catholic as well as
Orthodox’ (Sumner, op. cit., p. 46). A professedly ‘enlightened’ Russia that had entered
the field as Austria’s competitor in a race for the acquisition of the Ottoman Empire’s
heritage in South-East Europe was under double pressure not to fall below a Hapsburg
standard of religious toleration.

» Hadrovics estimates the number at 70,000-100,000 in op. cit., p. 140, n. r.

J For this Ottoman institution, sec pp. 184-6, below.

168 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
sovereignly. In virtue of thus bringing themselves, in despite of their
own traditions, to be as liberal as their Ottoman adversaries had been
towards an Orthodox Christian people for whose allegiance they were
now competing, the Hapsburgs succeeded in winning the refugee Serbs’
loyalty; 1 * * and, in the sequel, these Serb Orthodox Christian subjects of
the Hapsburg Monarchy living in Hungary and in the Militargrcnzen*
under their traditional Ottoman communal constitution became the
psychologically conductive medium through which the Modern Western
culture penetrated the Serb people as a whole.

Channels of Western Cultural Penetration into an Ottoman Orthodox
Christendom

What were the geographical channels through which this Modern
Western cultural influence seeped into the main body of Orthodox
Christendom ?

The oldest channel was the fraction of Orthodox Christian territory
remaining under Venetian rule in the Levant, which played the same
part in the relations between the main body of Orthodox Christendom
and the Modern West as was played in the relations between a Russian
Orthodox Christendom and the Modern West by the Russian Orthodox
Christian territories under the sovereignty of Poland-Lithuania. 5 Crete,
for example, by the date of the fall of Candia in a.d. 1669, had been
under Venetian rule for more than 450 years 4 —a length of tenure which,
in the records of Modem Western colonial empires down to the year
a.d. 1952, had been surpassed only by Portugal, and this only in her
possessions in and off the west coast of Africa. 5 During the Early
Modern chapter that was the last chapter in the history of Venetian rule
in Crete, the strength of the Modern Western cultural influence on the
local Greek Orthodox Christian population was revealed by their produc¬
tion of a literature in the contemporary Western vein in a Modern
Greek linguistic dress; and it is significant that not only the Italianatc
Modern Greek painter Dhommikos Thcotokdpoulos, alias ‘El Greco’
[vivebat a.d. 1541-1614), 6 but the Calvinistic Modem Greek Oecumeni¬
cal Patriarch Kyrillos Lotikaris ( vivebat a.d. 1572-1638), was born in
Crete as a Venetian subject. 7

The cutting off of this Cretan line of cultural communications be-

1 On the other hand, ns late as a.d. 1698, George Kastridtis, an envoy from the Hos-
podar of Wallachia to Moscow, was writing to Mazepa, the Hetman of the Ukraine,
who was at this date in the Muscovite camp: ‘We all pray with tears for the Sovereign
Monarch [Peter the Great] to save us from the Papists and Jesuits, who rage against
the Orthodox more than against the Turks and Jews . . . The secular war may finish
some time, but the Jesuit war never.’ This extract from Kastridtis’ letter is quoted by
Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire (Oxford 1950, Blackwell), p. 34.

1 For these Militiirgrenzen, see V. v. 462-3 and VI. vii. 117.

J See pp. 128-9, above.

* The effective occupation of Crete by the Venetians had begun in a.d. 1212.

* The Portuguese had discovered the Cape Verde Islands in a . d . 1456 and Angola in

A.D. 1484. The Spanish as well as the Portuguese colonial empire would, of course, have
to be dated back a hundred years earlier than that if the Azores, Madeira, and the
Canaries were to be reckoned as colonial acquisitions and not as extensions of Portugal’s
and Spain’s metropolitan territories. 6 See IV. iv. 360-1.

7 See Pichler, op. cit., p. 37; Rhenidris, op. cit., p. 4.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 169
tween Greek Orthodox Christendom and the Modern West through the
Ottoman conquest of Crete in a.d. 1645-69 was partially offset by the
Venetian conquest of the Morea in a.d. 1684-99, which brought under
Venetian rule a larger Greek Orthodox Christian population than had
been lost to Venice in her successive forfeitures of territory to the
Ottoman Empire between a.d. 1463 and a.d. 1669.’ Though these
Venetian acquisitions in Continental Greece were reconquered by the
‘Osmanlis in a.d. 1715, an ephemeral political episode had lasting cul¬
tural effects 2 because the Venetian Signoria had experienced, between
a.d. 1669 and a.d. 1684, the same rather sudden change of heart that
overtook the Hapsburg Monarchy in the same generation. The griev¬
ances of Venice’s Moreot subjects during their thirty years’ experience
of Venetian rule at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
were not religious but fiscal and economic. 1 Orthodox Christian pupils
were free to attend the schools and colleges founded by the Venetians in
the Morea* during an occupation of the peninsula which, so long as it
lasted, made it impossible for an obscurantist Oecumenical Patriarch,
as well as for his more tolerant master the Ottoman Padishah, to exercise
his jurisdiction over the Moreots; and the Moreot Greek municipal
institutions, which were so important a factor in the Greek uprising of
a.d. 1821 and in the subsequent establishment of an independent Greek
national state on a Western pattern, were in part a legacy of a system of
municipal government that had been introduced into the Morea during
this Venetian occupation on the model of the contemporary regime in
the North Italian city-states under Venetian hegemony, though they
were also in part a gradual and undesigned product of the Ottoman
practice of tax-farming. 5

After the Morea and Tinos had gone the same way in a.d. 1715 as
Crete in a.d. 1669 and Cyprus in a.d. 1571 and Negrepont in a.d. 1474,
a remnant of Greek Orthodox Christian population still remained under
Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands. The Ionian Islanders, who were
subject to a culturally alien political domination from the twelfth and

» See IV. iv. 279.

i This Venetian occupation of the Morea, and the contemporary and subsequent
Hapsburg occupation of Serbia, have been cited in another context (in V. v. 63778)
as examples of ephemeral intrusions, on the part of Modem Western empires, which
had been followed, after an equally ephemeral restoration of an anaen rtgwit, , by the
establishment, in the same territory, of a parochial national state on the Modem

j'see $nUy!op. cit., vol. v, pp. 208-9. According to Sakellarios, M. V.: 'Hntlovov-
\moos Kara Atvripav TovpKOKfxncav (1715-^21) (Athena 1939, Byzantinisch-
Neugriechischcn JahrbQcher), pp. 121-2, the Venetians had killed Moreot Greek com¬
merce and, though they had encouraged agriculture in the Morea, they had prohibited the
export of the produce (except for wine) to foreign markets. Their financial policy in the
Morea had created a currency famine there (see ibid., p. 126). After the Ottoman recon¬
quest of the Morea in A.D. 1715, the trade of the country was thrown open to all nations,
and production in the Morea increased (see ibid., pp. 124-5). These financial and econo¬
mic considerations explain why it was that in a.d. 1715 the; Greek Orthodox Christian
population of the Morea sided with the Turks against the Venetians (see ibid., p. 41).
At the same time, Leondiri was the only place in the Morea whew the Turkish re¬
conquest in a.d. 1715 was followed by conversions to Islam in appreciable numbers (see
ibid., p. H7>—in contrast to the religious sequel to the Turkish conquest of Candia in
a.d. 1669 (see p. 164, above).

* See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 212.

s Sec Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, pp. 197-9.

B 2898. vm

G 2

170 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

thirteenth centuries 1 to a.d. 1864,* were unique in being the only Greek
Orthodox Christians to be visited with an almost unbroken succession
of Western masters; 3 and the Venetian landowners who constituted the
Western ‘ascendancy’ here were likewise unique, for their part, in having
become converts from their ancestral Roman Catholic Christianity to
the Orthodoxy of the local Greek peasantry without having become
apostates from their ancestral Western culture, and in having learnt to
communicate with their agricultural labourers, tenants, body servants,
and mistresses in the local Romaic Greek vernacular without having
abandoned their traditional use of Italian as the exclusive language of
polite society and exclusive linguistic medium for education and literary
composition. The death-knell of this remote outpost of a Western
ancien regime was sounded by the French Revolution; yet, before the
merger of an old Ionian landowning aristocracy in a new democratic
Greek nation was expedited by the union of the Hcptancse with the
Kingdom of Greece in a.d. 1864, these seven diminutive plots of com¬
mon ground between the two Christendoms had given birth to two
islanders who each played an eminent part in the transmission of a
Modern Western culture to an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom. The
first of the two was the Corfiot Greek Westernizing philosopher-educa¬
tionalist Evy&iios Voiilgharis (vivebat a.d. 1716-1806)/ who was born
a Venetian subject. The second was the Zantiot Italian aristocrat-
poetaster Count Dionisio Salomone (vivebat a.d. 1798-1857), who died
under a British protectorate after having won fame in the West, as well
as in a Greek Orthodox Christendom, as the great Greek poet Dhionysios
Solomos. 5

Even in the Early Modern Age of religious faith and fanaticism,
Venice had been appreciably less intolerant than most contemporary
Western states/ either Catholic or Protestant. The Signoria was no
friend of the Society of Jesus; at the University of Padua, which served
the Venetian dominions, there was a relative freedom of philosophical
thought; 7 it had become customary for Cretans to seek a higher educa¬
tion there; 8 and colleges for Greek students were founded at both Padua
and Venice between a.d. 1590 and a.d. 1642/ Cyril Loukaris’ kinsman

* Corfii was seized by the Genoese pirate Vefrano in a.d. 1199 and by the Venetians
in a.d. 1206, but was recovered in a.d. 1214, and held till A.D. 1259, by the Epirot Greek
successor-state of the East Roman Empire, before being permanently annexed to West¬
ern Christendom by Manfred of Sicily. Ccfalonia and Zante were seized by the Sicilian
Normans area a.d. 118 s.

1 The date at which Great Britain renounced her protectorate and allowed the Ionian
Islanders to fulfil their desire for union with the Kingdom of Greece.

J This succession was technically broken during the years A.D. 1800-7, when the
Ionian Islanders were autonomous under a Russo-Ottoman protectorate. In the heyday
of the Ottoman Power the 'Osmanlis had succeeded occasionally in occupying some of
the islands temporarily without ever managing to confirm their hold.

« See pp. j 60-1, above. . _ _ J Sec pp. 670-80, below.

4 Rhenidris, op. cit., p. 4, points out the significance of this fact in the present
context.

7 'Padua fell under the rule of Venice from A.D. 1404, and Venice was the most success¬
fully anti-clerical state in Europe both at this time and for long afterwards. The freedom
of thought enjoyed by Padua attracted the ablest men, not only from the whole of the
Italian Peninsula, but also from the rest of Europe—William Hcrvcy . . . being a con¬
spicuous example of this' (Butterfield, II.: The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800
(London 1949, Bell), p. 43)- Sc« also Mettetal, op. cit., p. 19.

* See Rhemdris, op. cit., p. 5. 9 Sec Pichler, op. cit, p. 40.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 171
and patron Meletios Pighis, the Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria, had
studied in Venice, but had been debarred from taking a degree by his
refusal to subscribe to Roman Catholic doctrine and recognize Papal
supremacy, and had acquired in consequence a strong animus against
the Roman Church . 1 Meletios nevertheless sent Loukaris, in his turn,
to Venice for his education at the age of twelve ; 1 and, after spending four
years there, Loiikaris went on to spend seven further years as a student
at Padua . 3 Lodkaris’ younger contemporary and outstanding opponent
Meletios Syrighos ( natus a.d. 1585) was likewise a Cretan and likewise
an alumnus of the University of Padua, where he studied mathematics,
physics, and medicine ; 4 but the privilege of studying in the Venetian
University of Padua was not confined to Greek Orthodox Christians
who were Venetian subjects. At Padua Loukaris made friends with his
fellow student Nikiphdros Korydhalldfs of Athens , 5 who in a.d. 1624,
after Loukaris had become Oecumenical Patriarch, was to open at
Constantinople a school of a Calvinist complexion 6 and was to be
anathematized, like Loukaris himself, after Lodkaris’ final fall and
death . 7 The Chiot Alexander Mavrogorddto, too, studied medicine at
Padua 8 like the Cretan Syrighos, though, like the Athenian Korydhallcfs,
he was an Ottoman subject.

Another channel through which Modern Western influence flowed
into the main body of Orthodox Christendom was the Western diplo¬
matic corps at Constantinople, which became a force there during the
eclipse of the Ottoman Power after the death of Suleyman the Magnifi¬
cent in a.d. 1566. During the Thirty Years’ War (gerebatur a.d. 1618-48)
Constantinople, like Berne during the general War of a.d. 1914-18 and
Lisbon during the general war of a.d. 1939-45, was a theatre of diplo¬
matic hostilities on militarily neutral ground, and the diplomatic contest
that centred on the person of Cyril Loukaris has been described as a
repercussion of the contemporary struggle between Roman Catholicism
and Protestantism in the West . 9 The Dutch, English, Swedish, and
Venetian ambassadors were in league, at the time when Loukaris
ascended the Oecumenical Throne, against their Hapsburg and French
confreres , 10 and Loukaris’ intimacy with the Protestant diplomatic circles
in his see brought him not only local Western political patronage but
widespread Western cultural contacts—as is testified by his correspon¬
dence with the Dutch theologian Uytenbogaert and the Dutch states¬
man David le Leu dc Wilhem.

• See Pichler, op. cit.. p. 41. * See Pichler, op. cit., p. 4 °-

J See Pichler, op. cit., pp. 45 and 49 - 4 See Pich er, op. cit., p. 20S.

s See Pichler. op. cit., p. 47 - 6 See Pichler. op. cit., p. « 43 -

7 Korydhalltfs was anathematized by the Constantinopolitan Orthodox Church tor
objecting to the use of the Greek word utrovoiajois as a translation of the Latin word
transsubstaniiatio (Pichler. op. cit.. p. 221).

8 The monument of Alexander Mavrogordito’s studies at Padua was a Herveian trea¬
tise in Latin on the circulation of the blood: Pncumaticwn Instrumentum Ctradandi
Sanguinis, site de Motu el Usu Pulmonum Dissertatio Philosophtco-medica, Aulhore
AUxandro Mavrocordato Constantinopolitano, Philosophiae el MedutnaeDoclore (Bologna

other edition was published at Frankfurt in A.D.
E.: Bibliographic HelUnique, ou Description Raison-
au Dix-Septtimc SUcle, vol. ii (Paris 1894, Picard),

PP i See"]Rheniiris, op. cit., p. 30- 10 Sec PichIer » op. cit., p. 113.

1664, Typographia Fcrromana). An
166s by T. M. Goetz (See Legrand,
nie des Outrages Publics par des Grecs

172 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Thereafter, when the rally of the Ottoman Power under the leadership
of the House of Kopriilu was followed by a final lapse into dissolution,
the classic Ottoman political principle of non-territorial autonomy for all
communities in the Empire, not excluding resident aliens,' enabled the
embassies of Western Powers in Constantinople to erect themselves into
miniature imperia in imperio reigning, not only over their own nationals
in Ottoman territory, but also over Ottoman subjects who were their
official proteges. The germs of these Western protectorates can be
detected in some of the provisions of the capitulations granted to
England by the Porte in September 1675/ and in the Hapsburg-
Ottoman capitulatory treaty of the 27th July, 1718. 3 In the capitulations
granted to France in May 1740 these germs blossomed into a provision
authorizing the French Ambassador to maintain fifteen Ottoman subjects
as his servants free from taxation * After the Great Russo-Turkish War
of a.d. 1768-74, which was a milestone in the course of the Ottoman
Empire’s decline, this privilege of exercising a protectorate over Otto¬
man subjects was extended to other capitulatory Powers, and the Porte
presented each embassy with a certain number of blank ‘certificates of
denaturalization’ (as the Ottoman term herd'at might be interpreted in
this context), which the ambassadors were then free to bestow upon
Ottoman subjects of their own choice. 5

The Western embassies were more successful in abusing this privilege 6
than the Porte was in its belated attempts to restrict its scope. 7 The
consequence was that an appreciable number of Greek Orthodox
Christian and other Ottoman subjects came to participate in the fiscal
privileges that gave the nationals of capitulatory Powers a decisive
advantage over non-privileged Ottoman subjects in the now increasingly
important trade between the Ottoman Empire and the West ; 8 and this
made Ottoman subjects engaged in foreign trade so eager to obtain the
official protection of foreign governments that, shortly before the year
1824, 9 the Ottoman Government sought to reduce this incentive by
granting ‘most favoured foreign nation treatment’ to Ottoman subjects
trading with foreign countries who were not the official proteges of
foreign embassies. 10

1 This principle and the institutions in which it was embodied arc examined on pp.
184-6. below.

1 Arts. 28, 45, and 59. 3 Art. 5.

4 Ait. 47. In the same instrument the incipient rights of protectorate already secured
by England and the Hapsburg Monarchy were conferred on France likewise in Aits.
13 . 43 . 45 . 46, and 50.

J bee Finlay, op. cit., vol. vj, p. 107.

* See d’Ohsson, I. M.: Tableau Udniral dt VEmpire Ottoman (Paris 1788-1824,
Didot, 7 vols.), vol. vii, pp. 506-8.

1 Such attempts were made in the Anglo-Turkish peace treaty of the 6th January,
1809, Art. 9, and in the American-Turkish commercial treaty of the 7 th May, 1830,
Art. e.

* Sec d’Ohsson, op. cit., vol. vii, pp. 235 and 239.

9 shortly before the publication of the last volume of d’Ohsson’s work in that
year.

1® Sec d’Ohsson, op. cit., vol. vii, p. 509. The two principal benefits thereby extended
to non-protected Ottoman subjects were the issue of certificates of privilege and the
limitation of the rate of customs duties payable by them to the 3 per cent, ad valorem
which was at that time the maximum rate payable by the nationals and the Ottoman
prot 6 gis of the capitulatory Powers. The first instrument in which a definite rate of
customs duty ad valorem was fixed by mutual agreement would appear to have been the

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 173

This was a striking inversion of a stipulation in the Franco-Turkish
capitulatory treaty of February, 1535,' that French merchants were to
pay no higher duties than Ottoman subjects. That treaty was the arche¬
type of all instruments, bilateral or unilateral, conferring capitulatory
privileges in the Ottoman Empire on Modern Western Powers and their
nationals; and Ottoman subjects had indeed profited at the expense of
Westerners, in the competition for the profits of the maritime trade in
the Mediterranean, as a result of the political union of the main body
of Orthodox Christendom with the greater part of the Arabic World
under Ottoman rule at the beginning of the Modem Age of Western
history.

The first commercial effect of this political revolution in the Levant
had been to strike a deadly blow at the commerce of Venice, 2 Genoa, and
the other North Italian communities that had been progressively wrest¬
ing the maritime commerce of the Mediterranean out of Greek hands
since the eleventh century of the Christian Era; and, though the Greeks
too had been hard hit, economically as well as politically, by the Ottoman
conquest, 1 while all participants in the Mediterranean maritime trade
had suffered alike from a conquest of the Ocean by West European
peoples who had thereby turned the Mediterranean into a backwater, 4
the Greek subjects of the Porte found themselves, as a result of the
Ottoman conquest, in a stronger position for competing with the Franks
in the Mediterranean trade, even before they came to benefit from the
commercial privileges which the Modern Western Great Powers were
granted by the Porte from a.d. 1673 onwards. 5 The maritime trade via
the Mediterranean, on which the ‘Osmanlis’ Greek subjects thus secured
and maintained a hold, was another channel through which Western
cultural influences seeped into the main body of Orthodox Christendom, 6
and the cultural intercourse became more active as the Mediterranean
came back to commercial life at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. 7 Colonics of Ottoman Greek merchants were to be found in

capitulations granted to France on the 5th June, 1673. In this instrument, Additional
Article 5, it is laid down that import and export duties payable by French merchants are
to be reduced from 5 per cent., at which they had previously stood, to 3 per cent.

' Article 3.

a In the eighteenth century the Greek subjects of Venice in the Ionian Islands pre¬
ferred to trade under the Ottoman flag (Sakellarios, op. cit., p. 128).

3 The greatest single economic blow that was dealt to the Greeks by their Ottoman
conquerors was the settlement of Sephardi Jewish refugees from the Iberian Peninsula
in the chief commercial centres of the Ottoman Empire—e.g. Salonica, Adrianople,
Constantinople—to fill an economic vacuum created by the expulsion of the major part
of the former Greek population of these cities (sec II. ii. 245-6).

* Chios, for example, was hit by this diversion of the main channel of world trade
(Argenti, P, P.: Chius Vircta (Cambridge, 1941. University Press), pp. xli-xlii). From
the sixteenth century to circa a . d . 1791 the Chiots’ main economic activities were
agriculture and manufactures, not commerce (David, C. E., French Vice-Consul at
Chios: Dispatch dated 14th June, 1824 = Ministire des Affaires Etrangires, Paris,
Correspondance Consulaire de Scio. 1812-25 D-, No. 39 bl * enclosing 'Mdmoire sur
Scio’: printed in Argenti, P. P.: The Massacres of Chios described in Contemporary
Diplomatic Documents (London 1932, Lane), pp. 52-95, especially p. 67).

s For this date, sec p. 172, n. to, above.

6 The Chiots, for example, went to the West first in order to do business, but after¬
wards also in order to obtain a Western education (David, op. cit., p. 78).

2 The Mediterranean did not, of course, recover the position that it hud held before
the Oceanic Age; the Ocean continued to be the principal medium of communication
for a World that had been united by the Oceanic enterprise of West European peoples;

174 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the Mediterranean ports of Western Christendom as early as the six¬
teenth century ; 1 and the notable increase in the trade between the
Ottoman Empire and a geographically expanding Western World which
declared itself towards the end of the eighteenth century was marked by
the establishment of Greek commercial colonies in London, Liverpool,
Manchester, and New York as well as in Venice, Leghorn, Marseilles,
and Trieste . 1 These Greek settlements in partibus Occidentalium came
to act like lenses which focused the cultural influence of the West and
transmitted it to the Levant in concentrated rays of a high degree of
potency.

The economic and consequent cultural opportunities opened up to
Greek Ottoman subjects by this revival of maritime trade between the
Levant and the West via the Mediterranean were made the most of by a
few maritime Ottoman communities that enjoyed some measure of local
autonomy, whether by charter or by custom or merely by oversight. 1
The outstanding chartered communities were the mastic-growing island
of Chios, the olive-growing peninsula of Ayvalyq (Kydhonies), 4 and the
two continental Greek portlets of Ghalaxtdhi 5 on the Gulf of Corinth and
Trikdri 6 commanding the entrance to the Gulf of Volo. Among the
communities that benefited by custom or oversight were the previously
derelict Aegean islands Hydhra 7 and Pdtses, 8 off the coast of the Argolid,
which were colonized in the eighteenth century by Orthodox Christian

but in the course of the eighteenth century the Mediterranean did begin to change from
being a mere backwater in an Oceanic system of waterways into becoming a through-
route between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean which had the advantage of being a
short cut. This rehabilitation of the Mediterranean was consummated by the opening
of the Suez Canal in a.d. 1869 (sec IV. iv. 23), but the process had begun at least a hun¬
dred years before that. One cause of it was the progressive establishment of British rule
in India, beginning with Bengal, which led the British to search for a shorter and quicker
route between England and India than the Oceanic route via the Cape of Good Hope
(sec Hoskins, H. L.: British Routes to India (London 1928, Longmans Green)). A second
cause was the opening up of a new continental hinterland to the Mediterranean through
the replacement of Nomadism by the sedentary civilization of Russian Orthodox
Christendom in the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe along the north coast of
the Black Sea as a consequence of the Russian victory in the Russo-Turkish War of
a.d. 1768-74 (see III. iii. 428). A third cause was the Westernization of Egypt, which
was initiated by the French military invasion in a.d. 1798.

1 See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 156.

1 The Chiots, for example, who appear to have had no permanent commercial
establishments abroad before a.d. 1780, began to settle in Western and Russian maritime
and commercial entrepfits from about that date onwards. Two members of the Ralli
family can be traced as far back as a.d. 17S0 in Leghorn; and there was an Avierino at
Taganrog by a.d. 1795; “ Zarakhnni and a Zizinia at the same Russian port in a.d. 1805;
a Kapparis at Theodosia and a Rhodhokandkis at Genoa by the same year; an Argcnti. a
Psyknas, and a Ralli at Amsterdam by a.d. 1810; a Galatti and a Psykhas at Isma'il by
the same year; and an Argcnti at Marseilles by A.D. 1818 (Argcnti, The Massacres of
Chios, p. xxiv, n. 1). After the catastrophe of A.D. 1822, Chiot refugees founded further
colonics in Constantinople, Egypt, the new dominions of Russia along the north coast
of the Black Sea, Leghorn, Trieste, Vienna, Marseilles. Paris, London, Liverpool,
Manchester, and the Lnited States of America (ibid., pp. xxiii-xxiv; cp. Chius Vincia, p.
cxcviii). Chiot emigrants seem to have been quicker than other Greek emigrants to adapt
themselves to the Western way of life (Chius Vincia. p. exxi). Committees for raising
funds for education in Chios were organized by the Chiot diaspora in Trieste, Leghorn,
Marseilles. Paris. London, Liverpool, and Manchester (ibid., p. ccxvi).

J See II. ii. 262. * For Ayvalyq, sec II, ii. 40, n. 1.

-* See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 281, and vol. vi, p. 167.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 175
Albanians from the Morea, and Kdsos 1 and Psar&, 2 in the Sporades,
which were colonized in the same age by Orthodox Christian Greeks.*

The attraction of these barren islands, and of the stony peninsula of
Ayvalyq, was a hope of escaping the increasing fiscal oppression under
which the Orthodox Christian settlers on these uninviting spots had
been suffering in their previous homes in an age when a declining
Ottoman Power was no longer able to protect its subjects against its
agents. The colonist-islanders—who had to fling themselves on the sea
as their only alternative to starvation—found favour with an Ottoman
Government that in this age was eager to foster a native maritime popu¬
lation both as a counter-move in the commercial field to Western
encroachments on Ottoman commerce and as a reservoir in the military
field for the man-power of an Ottoman Navy on the Modern Western
model.

The Qapudan Pasha Hiiseyn Jezayrli, who as Grand Admiral was ex
officio governor of the Archipelago and the Mani, 4 had no fewer than

1 Sec Finlay, op. cit., vol. vi, p. 166.

» See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 281, and vol. vi, p. 167.

1 The autonomy enjoyed by these maritime Ottoman Greek communities that turned
it to commercial account was shared by a number of highland communities, most of
which also adjoined the sea. We may notice the MAni in the Morea; SphakiA in Crete;
and KhimArrha, the Armatoli of Pindus and the Agrapha, the Elefterokhdria, Mount
Athos, the Pclion ZagorA and the Dhervenokhdria in Rumili. Of these all but the Mini,
SphakiA, and KhimArrha were officially recognized by the Porte.

The Mini was independent dtjacio till a.d. 1670, the year after the Ottoman conquest
of Candia (Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, pp. 116-17); ,n that year it was compelled to receive
Ottoman garrisons and to pay kharfii; in a.d. 1685 it made a pact with Venice through
which it secured autonomy under Venetian rule (Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 205). After
the Ottoman reconquest of the Morea in a.d. 1715, the Maniots retained their autonomy
but were compelled to resume payment of kharfij. They joined the Russians when these
invaded the Morea in a.d. 1770 (Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, pp. 252-3), and reacknowledged
the sovereignty of the Porte in a.d. 1777. In A.D. 1S03-4 they were again brought to
heel by the Ottoman authorities after they had flirted with the French (Sakcllarios, op.
cit., pp. 236-7). In a.d. i82r their chieftain Petrobcy gave the signal for the Greek
national uprising by attacking the Ottoman garrison of MistrA.

SphakiA was compelled to pay khnrSj in a.d. 1770 (Finlay, op. cit., vol. v. pp. xii and
263). Its autonomy was respected in practice by the Porte thereafter (Finlay, op. cit.,
vol. vi, p. 4).

The Khimarrhiots made the living that they could not wring out of the rocks of Acro-
ccraunus by serving as mercenaries in the armies of Venice and Naples (see Mozart’s Cosi
Fan Tulli, lutum a.d. 1790).

The Armatoli have been noticed already in another context in V. v. 297-8*

The Elcftcrokhdria were three confederations of villages on the Peninsula of Khalkid-
hikl which governed themselves and collected their own taxes under the superintendence
of an Ottoman resident backed by a token military force (Finlay, op. cit., vol. vi p. 202).

Mount Athos (’the Holy Mountain’) was an autonomous federal republic of Orthodox
Christian monasteries, including representatives of most of the Orthodox Christian
nationalities, though the Greeks had a great preponderance. Here too the Porte %vaa
represented merely by a resident (Finlav, op. cit., vol. vi, pp. 203-4).

The ZagorA ( Slavicf ‘Among the Mountains’) was a cluster of densely populated
Greek Orthodox Christian villages running up the western flank of Mount Pelion over¬
looking the Plain of Thessaly. Its autonomy was recognized by the Porte and ad¬
ministered by elective magistrates (Finlay, op. cit., vol. vi, pp. 200-1).

The Dhervcnokhdria were five Albanian Orthodox Christian tillages, mustering two
thousand fighting men, who were commissioned by the Porte to police the overland
route between Rumili and the Morea over Mount Cithseron and Mount Gcraneia
(Finlay, op. cit., vol. vi, p. 30). .

* The QapudAn Pasha administered this governorship through the agency of his
Phanariot Greek Orthodox Christian aecretary the Drtgoman of the Fleet (sec d’Ohsson,
I. M.: Tableau GMral de VEmpire Ottoman (Paris 1788-1824, 7 vols.), vol. vu (Paris
1824, Didot), p. 431, and Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 242). The Mani had been separated
administratively from the Morea, and been added to the Qapudan Pasha’s domain, after

176 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
two hundred Hydhriot sailors serving on board his flagship in a.d. 1797,
and this service won for Hydhra valuable privileges. In a.d. 1802 the
Qapud 3 n Pasha appointed a native Hydhriot Christian governor, and
the taxes payable by the island to the Porte were commuted for a contin¬
gent of 250 men to the fleet and a gratuity to the Qapudan Pasha and his
staff. 1 The same boons of local self-government and light taxation were
granted to P< 5 tscs, Kdsos, and Psar& on the same considerations. Under
these exceptionally favourable conditions the four islands and the two
continental portlets developed a merchant marine which earned high,
though short-lived, profits during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic
Wars (gerebantur a.d. 1792-1815), when the Ottoman flag was the only
neutral flag left in the Mediterranean; and the lion’s share of the trade
carried on under this flag was secured by this handful of Ottoman
Orthodox Christian maritime communities. 2 This windfall from a storm
in the neighbouring Western World ceased to drop into these Ottoman
Greek mariners’ hands as soon as the Western peoples emerged from
their Napoleonic bout of fratricidal warfare; 3 and the unemployment,
distress, and discontent arising from the rapid decline in the volume of
their commercial business after a.d. 1815 made these communities ready,

a.d. 1777, when it had reacknowledgcd the sovereignty of the Porte, which had been in
abeyance there since the Russian descent on the Morea in a.d. 1770 (Finlay, op. cit.,
vol. v, pp. 265-6).

1 See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 283, and vol. vi, pp. 32-33.

2 See Sakcllarios, op. cit., pp. 212-15. In this lucrative but ephemeral Ottoman Greek
trade the Chiots found a leading role to play. About the year A.D. 1780 their manufac¬
tures—of which the most valuable was a silk industry inherited from the period of
Genoese rule—had succumbed to Western industrial competition; but, after the out¬
break of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the West, Chiot capitalists financed
the Hydhriot, Pctaiot, and Psariot merchant marine that was earning profits by carrying
grain, oil, and other produce of the Ottoman Empire from Anatolia, Salonica, and Egypt
to the ports of the Napoleonic French Empire. The Chiots then established business
houses at Marseilles, Trieste, and Leghorn (see p. 179, n. 2, above) to correspond with
their houses at Constantinople, Salonica, and above all at Smyrna, where Chiot enter¬
prise had made an entrepflt for the exchange of Western manufactures with the products
of the interior of Anatolia. After the annexation of Croatia to the French Empire in a.d.
1809, the Chiots took part, from their commercial bases in Salonica and Smyrna, in an
overland trade which the French proceeded to open up via Bosnia with the Ottoman
World. From Constantinople, Chiot merchants exported cloth to Austria. Chios made
her fortune in twenty years (David, op. cit., pp. 67-70).

Even the hitherto almost exclusively agrarian Ottoman Greek community in the
Morea shared in this temporary commercial prosperity. When the liquidation of the
Venetian dominion over the Morea in a.d. 1715 had been followed by the collapse of
the local Venetian commercial supremacy, the Venetian commercial heritage in the Morea
had been captured, not by the Moreot Greeks, but by the French (see Sakcllarios, op.
cit., pp. 126-8). The cereal* exported from the Morea had all been shipped to Marseilles,
while the currant crop had been shipped to Great Britain and Holland (ibid., pp. 128
and 210). There is no record of Greek merchants participating in the trade of the Morea
before the foundation of a commercial company by Bcndki of Kalamita in a.d. 1761
(ibid., pp. 128-0). The French traders in the Morea were, however, ruined by the
abortive Greek Christian insurrection and retaliatory Albanian Muslim barbarian con¬
quest in a.d. 1770-9 (ibid., p. 216); what remained of the eighteenth-century trade
through a French channel was paralysed by the outbreak of the French Revolution
(ibid., p. 212); and, when the Napoleonic Wars offered their golden opportunity to
neutral Ottoman carriers, Moreot landowners, Turkish as well as Greek, stepped into
the ruined French merchants’ shoes (ibid.,pp. 211, 218, and 244).

3 This commercial stagnation after a.d. 1815 made itself felt in Chios as well as in the
seafaring Greek islands (David, op. cit., p. 71). Yet the trade between Chios and the
West nevertheless remained so important that the catastrophe of a.d. 1822 was reported
by the Hapsburg Intcmuncio at Constantinople to have been severely felt in many towns
in Germany, France, Italy, and England (Argcnti, P. P.: The Massacres of Chios, pp.
xv-xvi and 127).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 177
in a.d. 1821, to join in a Greek national insurrection—inspired by
Western political ideas—which held out hopes for them of replacing
the dwindling profits of trade by the spoils of buccaneering. 1

In the Westernization of the main body of Orthodox Christendom
through the maritime channel, a particularly important part was played
by the Greek island of Chios, which had been under Western rule for
just about two and a half centuries by the date of its annexation to the
Ottoman Empire in a.d. 1566, 2 and which retained both its Western
political constitution 5 and its Western cultural complexion 4 under

• Statistics of the number of families, and the number of ships of a tonnage of over
a hundred tons, to be found at Hy-dhra, PAtses, KAsos, Psari, Ghalaxldhi, and TrikAri
in a.d. 1 Sax, on the eve of the Greek uprising of that year, are given in Finlay, op. cit.,
vol. vi, p. 167.

* Chios fell into the hands of a piratical Genoese family, the Zaccaria, in the reign of
the Hast Roman Emperor Andronicus II Palaioldghos (imperabat a.d. 1282-1328).
During the last 220 years before the Ottoman conguest the Western masters of Chios
were a Genoese chartered company, the Maons, which had obtained possession of the
island in a.d. 1346 after its liberation from the Zaccaria in a.d. 1329.

J The Chiots twice secured the restoration of their traditional institutions of self-
Rovemment after an Ottoman military occupation, because the ‘Osmanlis had the wit
to realize that the economic prosperity of the island, which was so profitable for the
Ottoman treasury, might evaporate if the islanders were no longer to be allowed to
manage their own affairs in their own way.

After the original annexation in a.d. 1566, a Chiot deputation, led by the ‘Latin' (i.e.
Roman Catholic) bishop, and including one representative each of the Greek Church,
the Greek merchants, the Latin merchants, and the Greek nobility, obtained from the
Porte in A.D. 1567. through the good offices of the Qapudan Pasha Pialc, who had been
the Porte’s instrument in annexing Chios to the Ottoman Empire in the preceding year,
a charter rcconfcrring self-government on the islanders and exempting them from the
dtvrishmi (the recurrent levy of children for the Padishah’s Slave-Household) and from
other ills to which the unprivileged ra'iyeh were subject (Argcnti: Chius Vincta, pp.
cxxxvii-clix). This charter of A.D. 1567 was followed in a.d. 1578 by another which was
still more favourable, particularly in the matter of taxation (ibid., p. clix). More than a
hundred years later, in a.d. 1696, after the Ottoman reconquest of Chios on the 21st
February, 1695, from the Venetians, who had occupied the island on the 12th September,
1694, the Sultan expressly reconfirmed the island’s constitutional privileges at the inter¬
cession of Alexander MavrogordAto (ibid., pp. clxxiv-v).

Chios appears to have enjoyed greater security under Ottoman than under Genoese
rule, and to have found it less difficult to obtain redress for its grievances from the suze¬
rain Power (Argcnti: Chius Vincta, p. cxxiii).

One effect of the restoration of the island’s local autonomy under Ottoman auspices
was to transfer political power in the island from a ‘Latin’ Roman Catholic minority
of Genoese origin to a Greek Orthodox Christian majority—or at any rate to an aristo¬
cratic minority of this majority. By the terms of their capitulation to the Genoese
conqueror Simone Vignoso on the 12th September, 1346, the Greek inhabitants of
Chios had transferred their allegiance from the Imperial Government at Constantinople
to the Republic of Genoa on the conditions (among others) that they should be allowed
to retain their ancestral religion and customs, including the right to elect their own
Metropolitan, and the existing privileges of their nobility (Argenti: Chius Vincta, p.
xlii, n. 2); but all political power had passed into the hands of the Genoese Government
and the chartered company (maona, Arabici ma'awnah) which had financed the con-

! aest. After the extinction of this Genoese rtgime by the ‘Osmanlis in a.d. 1566, the
reek Orthodox Christian Chiots were admitted to office in the government of the island
(Argcnti: Chius Vincta, p. cxxii), and they eventually gained a preponderant voice in it.
By a.d. 1760, Chios was being governed by an Orthodox Christian oligarchy. On the
board of dhimoyArondcs, two places out 0! five were reserved for the Greek nobility,
one place for the Greek plebeians, and two places for the Latins (ibid., pp. clxxx-
clxxxi).

The ‘Latin’ minority in Chios lost ground politically, not only in consequence of the
Ottoman annexation in a.d. 1566, which deprived it of a political ascendancy that it had
been enjoying for more than two hundred years by that date, but also in consequence
of the Florentine expedition against Chios in a.d. 1599 and the Venetian occupation of
the island in A.D. 1694-5 (see Argcnti, P. P.: Tht Expedition 0/ the Florentines to Chiot,

[Ccnf. on next poge,

* See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, pp. 79-80.

178 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Ottoman sovereignty. An experience and ability in business, and a
familiarity with the West which was both a cause and a consequence of
this economic success, qualified the Chiots for serving the Porte in its
dealings with Western neighbours with whom it no longer found itself
able to settle its accounts by sheer force of arms; and it was no accident
that the first two incumbents of the office of Dragoman of the Porte,
Panayiotikis Nikoussios (fungebatur a.d. 1669—73)' and Alexander
Mavrogordito {fungebatur a.d. 1673-99)* were both connected with
Chios. 3 Alexander Mavrogordato's father was a Chiot silk-merchant,
and his maternal grandfather had made a fortune as a wholesale purveyor
of beef to the Palace and the public markets at Constantinople.

Thereafter, Chios produced the scholar-publicist Adhamdndios
Korais* [vivebat a.d. 1748-1833), who, in a Greek Orthodox Christian
Westernizing movement that sprang from below upwards, is the
symbolic figure corresponding to the autocrat-technician Peter the
Great in a Russian Orthodox Christian Westernizing movement that
was imposed from above downwards.

Korais’ father was a Chiot who had settled at Smyrna, a continental
Anatolian port, commanding a magnificent hinterland, where Western
merchants had been the commercial pioneers and Western influences
counted for more than they did at Constantinople at the time. In the
new Greek community, of divers local origins, that had been called into
existence at Smyrna by the economic opportunities created there by
Western enterprise, Korais’ father rose to be a churchwarden, an
alderman (Brmoyepos), and Prime Warden of the Smyrniot Guild of
Chiot Merchants (JJpunopaylarotp rijs rGiv Xlcuv ’EpTropcov Zwrtxyias );
and, though he was himself a business man of no education, his wife was

J 599 (London 1934, Lane); cundem: The Occupation oj Chios by the Venetians, 1694
(London 1935, Lane), which brought upon the Chiot 'Latin' community an odium and a
mistruit, in their Ottoman suzerains’ feelings towards them, from which their Greek
Orthodox Christian fellow islanders remained exempt. After the Ottoman reoccupation
in a.d. 1695 the ‘Latin’ Chiota were condemned to the galley* and their property was
distributed by the Ottoman authorities among the Orthodox Chiots, who had been
plundered by the Venetians. At the same time the Sultan ordered all Orthodox Chiots
who had been forcibly convened to Roman Catholicism by the Venetians to return to
Orthodoxy. The French Ambassador at Constantinople secured from the Porte a re¬
vocation of the sentence on the ‘Latins’ to serve in the galleys, on condition that they
publicly renounced Roman Catholicism and embraced Orthodoxy (Argenti, The Occupa¬
tion of Chiot by the Venetians, pp. xcii-xciii); but from a.d. 1695 to a.d. 1720 the Latin
community in Chios was excluded, by fiat of the Porte, from participation in the local
administration (Argenti: Chius Vincta, p. cci). Their subsequent recovery of their
political rights seems to have been due to a further intervention on the pan of the French
Ambassador at Constantinople (see Finlay, on. cit., vol. v, p. 238).

The mastic-growing villages in the south of the island were placed by the Porte under
a special regime. They were exempt from kharilj but had to deliver 25,000 oqas of mastic
gum to the Porte annually free of charge, and to sell the rest of the crop to the Pone at
the price of 24 kurush for the oqa (Argenti: Chius Vincta, pp. cclxxi-ii).

1 Sec Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. xi; Jorga, on. cit., vol. iv, p. 281; Zolotis, G. I.:
'Jcnopia rfjs Xtov, vol. iii. Part I (Athens 1926, Sakellarios), pp. 441-2.

1 Sec Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 242; Jorga, op. cit., vol. iv, p. 283; Zolotis, op. cit.,
vol. in, Part I, pp. 424 - 39 ; Part II (Athens 1928, Sakellarios), pp. 730-44.

J Panayiotikis was educated at Chios, but appears to have been of Rumeliot, not of
Chiot, origin.

4 This surname is presumably a Greek version of an Arabic oarrd', signifying ‘an
accomplished reader (of the Scriptures)’. The corresponding Hebrew word qara'im
(plural) had been adopted as a name by a sect of anti-Talmudist Jews who prided
themselves on being ‘readers (of the Law and the Prophets as opposed to the commen¬
taries upon them)’ (see II. ii. 411).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 179
a schoolmaster’s daughter, and he had an ancestor, Anddnios Korais,
who had been a doctor of medicine, had travelled to Paris, and had
published literary works in Western Europe in the last quarter of the
seventeenth century . 1

The money made by Adhamdndios Korais’ father in business at
Smyrna enabled Adhamdndios to emulate their Chiot ancestor’s career.
In a.d. 1782 he went to the University of Montpellier 2 to study medicine
there; in a.d. 1788 he went on to Paris; and, after imbibing there the
Modern Western enthusiasm for the Ancient Greek classical literature,
and witnessing the irruption of Democracy into Modern Western life
through the French Revolution, he settled in Paris for good and devoted
the forty-five years of his sojourn there (a.d. 1788-1833) to the service
of his countrymen in the Levant both as a scholar and as a publicist.
As a scholar he laboured to make the Ancient Greek classics accessible
to his Modern Greek contemporaries by editing them with introductions
and notes in a version of the Modem Greek language which he sought to
fashion into a vehicle for conveying the Modern Western culture. 3 As
a publicist he laboured to guide his compatriots in their endeavours to
translate into political terms a latter-day aspiration to adopt the Modern
Western way of life. 14

Korais was alive to the importance of the part in the Modern Greek
Westernizing movement that the Chiots had it in them to play, as he
showed in a letter written by him from Paris on the 4th July, 1823, to
Prince Alexander Mavrogorddto, a contemporary Greek statesman who,
like Korais, was of Chiot origin, in virtue of being a descendant of the
celebrated seventeenth-century Dragoman of the Porte. This Phanariot
contemporary of Korais had thrown in his lot with the Greek insurgents
against Ottoman rule who had been fighting since a.d. 1821 to carve
a Greek national state, on a post-Revolutionary Modern Western
pattern, out of Ottoman territory in the Morea and Rumelia; and in
this enterprise he was given the following advice by his Parisian
mentor:

‘It is essential that in your arduous task you should obtain the support
of worthy collaborators, and it will be difficult for you to find them except
among the Chiots—not that they are intellectually superior to other

: In seeking their education in the West, Anddnios Korais and Alexander Mavro-
gordato (see p. 171, above) had been following an unbroken Chiot tradition dating from
the Genoese age of Chian history. At Rome a scholarship for Chiot students had been
founded by Allatius at the College of Saint Athanasius (a Roman Catholic College for
Greeks). Emmanuel Timoni, the Chiot discoverer of vaccination, had studied at Padua
shortly before a.d. 1691. In A.D. 1773 the Peter Schilirzi hospital in Chios was founded
by a Chiot who had studied medicine in Florence and who modelled his foundation in
his native Greek island on a hospital in his Italian alma mater. The practice of going to
Italy for their education remained common among Chiots until the catastrophe of a.d.
1822. This was one of the reasons why the Chiots were distinguished from other Otto¬
man Greeks by their greater familiarity with the West (Argcnti, Chius Vincta, p. exx),
and why in the eighteenth century Chios was the educational centre for the Greeks
of Constantinople, Smyrna, and Egypt (Argenti, The Massacres oj Chios, p. xxiv).

* Montpellier was the university that served the hinterland of the port of Marseilles,
to which it stood more or less in the relation of Padua to Venice.

J The Modem Greek language problem has been touched upon in V. vi. 68-70.

« For Adhamindios Korais’ antecedents and career, see Thereianos, D.: AdhamOndios
Korais (Trieste 1889-90, Austrian Lloyd Press, 3 vols.), vol. i, pp. 89-90; Finlay, op. cit,
vol. v, pp. 285-6.

180 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Greeks,' but because they have proved, by their achievements in adminis¬
tering their township under the yoke of slavery, how fit they arc to contri¬
bute to the common work for Hellas when they arc free. They have
achieved concord and they possess what Aristotle calls “the eye that comes
from experience”. They are the right people to inspire their brother
Hellenes with their own concord and to share with them the fruits of
their own experience.’*

Besides the Chiots and other maritime Greeks under Ottoman and
Venetian rule and the ra'iyeh under the protection of Western embassies
at Constantinople, there were Greek and Vlach communities under
Ottoman rule in Rumclia that served as carriers of the Modern Western
culture into the main body of Orthodox Christendom by taking advan¬
tage of commercial opportunities opened up by Hapsburg military
successes at the Ottoman Empire’s expense. Though the Hapsburg
armies’ momentary incursion into Serbia in a.d. 1689 was followed by
longer-lasting occupations of the Lower Morava Basin in a.d. 1718-39
and in a.d. 1788-92, no Serb Orthodox Christian territory south of the
Save and Danube was permanently incorporated into the Hapsburg
Monarchy. At the same time, these ephemeral military and political
actes de presence of the Hapsburg Power in Serbia, and, still more, its
permanent establishment in the ex-Ottoman portion of Hungary, just
across the river from Belgrade, had the economic effect of stimulating
an overland trade between Central Europe and the Levant; and, though,
in the nineteenth-century chapter of this story, the linking of Vienna
and Budapest with Constantinople and Salonica was a work of Austrian
enterprise, 1 the initiative in opening this overland trade-route up had
been taken in the eighteenth century by Rumeliot Orthodox Christian
subjects of the Porte who transported their merchandise on the backs of
pack-animals. 4

These eightecnth-ccntury Rumeliot trading ventures along the over¬
land route were family businesses in which die heads of a business at
its Rumclian headquarters were in partnership with kinsmen stationed
at Budapest, Vienna, and Leipzig as the family firm’s representatives at
the trade’s Western terminals. This business organization based on
kinship was a key to commercial success which was at the same time a
potent conductor of Modern Western culture into Rumeliot Orthodox
Christian homes. The Rumelian terminals and headquarters of the
trade were apt to be fastnesses that were less handicapped than favoured

1 Cyril Lotikaris, in his day, had been disgusted at the ignorance of Kor&si and
other Chiots (Mcttctal, op. cit., p. 96).—A.J.T.

1 Korais, A.: ’Arraumt^ia % Emtrro\uv (Athens 1839, Rallis). pp. 258-9. A much larger
collection of Korais’ letters has been published by N. M. Dhamalds (Athens 1885-6,
Perrhis, 3 vols.).

3 The linking up of Constantinople with Austria-Hungary by a continuous perman¬
ent way was accomplished between the years A.D. 1872 and a.d. 1888. Salonica, and
eventually Athens, were linked up with the Belgrade-Constantinople line by a branch
which diverged from it at Nish.

* At Shdtishta, in South-Western Macedonia, on the 5 th- 6 th September, 1921, the
waiter of this Study met an old man who, as a boy, had accompanied his father on one
of the last of the overland caravan-expeditions between Shitishta and Central Europe
before the pack-animal trade was killed by the building of the Oriental Railway. From
start to finish, this overland voyage on foot had kept the merchant-adventurers on the
road for many months at a stretch (see II. ii. 262).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS x8x
by their physical inaccessibility in an age when, for the subjects of a
disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the condition sine qua non, if they were
to have any chance of economic prosperity, was the enjoyment of some
exceptional relief from the prevalent pressure of Ottoman misgovcrn-
ment. x The Westernization of a Rumeliot fastness is vividly portrayed in
an account of a visit paid on the 23rd-24th December, 1801, by a British
traveller to the industrial village of Ambeldkia, which had struck him as
being

•one of the most extraordinary places in all Turkey, because, being situate
in the most secluded spot of the whole empire, and where no one would
look for the haunts of active industry, it carries on an extensive commerce,
the effects of which were once severely felt by our own manufacturers in
Britain- ...

‘The town consists of four hundred houses, as it were hanging upon
this side of Mount Ossa, above the Pass of Tempe : 2 it contains no Turkish
inhabitants, and enjoys a state of freedom forcibly contrasted with the
condition of other places in the same neighbourhood, although not
exempted from imposts. .

'We might almost have imagined ourselves to be in Germany. I he
inhabitants arc many of them from that country; and they are a thriving
healthy-looking people. They wear the eastern dress, but they have intro¬
duced many foreign manners and customs among those of Greece. Some
German merchants, upon our arrival, sent to us the last Frankfort Gazettes ;
and soon afterwards they paid us a visit. As we intended to pass the night
here, we accompanied them to see their staple manufactory for dying
cotton thread of a red colour, which not only supports and enriches the
inhabitants, but has given rise to a commerce so considerable that whole
caravans are laden with this cotton for the markets of Pest, Vienna,
Leipsic, Dresden, etc.; and hardly a day passes without some exports
being made, which are carried even to Hamburgh. ... ... _

'About this time the merchants of Ampelakia began to feel the eftect
of the preference given to English cotton thread in the German markets;
and it was a subject of their complaint. “They foresaw," they said, "that
the superior skill of the English manufacturers, and their being enabled
to undersell every other competitor upon the Continent, would ultimately
prove the ruin of their establishment.” This, no doubt, is owing to the
improvement adopted in Great Britain of spinning cotton thread in mills,
by means of engines that are worked by steam, which has caused such a
considerable reduction in its price—all the thread made at Ampelakia
being spun by manual labour. The beautiful red tincture of the 1 urkish
cotton will, however, long maintain its pristine celebrity. It has never
been perfectly imitated in England. The English cotton thread is much
finer, but it has not the tenacity of that which is manufactured in Turkey;
neither is its colour so durable. . .

'The whole population of Ampelakia, amounting to four thousand souls,
including even the children, is occupied in the preparation of this single
article of commerce; the males in dyeing the wool, and the females in
spinning the thread. . . . Although but a village, AmpelSkia contains

1 Sec the passage quoted from Rycaut’s book in II. ii. 265, n. 2.

* On the 2nd September. 1021, the writer of this Study managed to catch one glimpse
of Ambcldkia from the window of a railway caninge as he was 'nv*lluw ‘J? 1 "
through the Vale of Tempe on a section of the line between AthensandSsIomcathit
had been built after the annexation of Southern Macedonia to the kingdom of Greece
as a result of the Balkan Wars of a.d. 1912-13.—A.J.T.

IS 2 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

twenty-four fabrics for dyeing only. Two thousand five hundred bales of
cotton (each bale weighing two hundred and fifty pounds) are annually
dyed here, the principal produce of the manufacture bcingsent to Vienna.’ 1

The Reception of a Modern Western Culture by the Ottoman Orthodox
Christians and its Political Consequences

The Modern Western influence that radiated into the main body of
Orthodox Christendom through these overland and maritime channels
was playing upon a society which was living at the time under a universal
state imposed by an alien Power, and in these circumstances the course
of the Orthodox Christian Westernizing movement, evoked by this
radiation of the Western culture in its modern form, was different from
that of the contemporary process in a Russian Orthodox Christendom
that was overtaken by the impact of the Modern West in a universal state
which had been made by, and remained in, native Russian hands. In the
main body of Orthodox Christendom, unlike Russia, the attempt to
adopt a Modern Western way of life was made on the educational plane
first and on the political plane afterwards, instead of vice versa. The
academic work of an Adhamdndios KoraTs in his sanctum at Paris, and
of a Vuk Karadzic in his sanctum at Vienna, preceded the insurrections
of a Qara George and a MiloS Obrenovic in the Shumadiya and a
Petrobey in the Mani against Ottoman rule, whereas, in a Russia ruled by
a Russian autocrat, Peter the Great was not the disciple but the fore¬
runner of a Westernizing school of Modern Russian men of letters.

The measure of the extent of the seventeenth-century revolution in
the Greek attitude towards the culture of the West is given by the
contrast between the disdain for Latin barbarism that had been felt or
affected by Byzantine intellectuals of the school of Photius, Psellus, and
Anna Comnena and the cult of 'Enlightened Europe’ 2 that was practised
and preached by Korals.

• Clarke, E. D.: Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa, Part II,
Section iii (London r816, Cade)] and Davies), pp. 281 and 285-8, cited in II. ii. 26, n. 4.
Sec also Beaujour, F.: Tableau du Commerce de la Grice (Paris 1800, Renouard, 2 vols.),
vol. i, pp. 272-5:

'Ambilakia par son activity rcsscmble plutflt & un bourg dc Hollande qu’i un village
de Turkie. Ce village ripand par son indust tie le mouvement ct la vie dans tout lc pays
d’alcntour, et il donne naissance k un commerce immense qui lie l'AUcmagnc a la Grice
par mille fils. Sa population, qui a tripli depuis quinze ans, est aujourd'hui de quatre
mille Smes; et toutc cettc population vit dans Ics tcinturcrics, comme un essaim
d’abeilles vit dans une ruche. On nc connait point dans cc village les vices ni les soucis

K ’engendre l’oisiveti. Les ctrurs des Ambilakiotes sont purs et leurs visages contcns.

servitude qui flitriti leurs pieds les campagnes qu’arrosc le Pinic n'est point montie
sur leurs cotcaux: aucun Turk nc peut habiter ni sejourncr parmi cux, et its se gouver-
nent comme leurs ancetres par leurs protoyeros ct par leurs propres magistrats. Deux
fois les farouchca Muaulmans de Larisse, jaloux de Icur aisance et dc leur bonheur, ont
tenti d'cscaladcr leurs montagnes et dc pijler leurs maisons; et deux fois ils ont iti rc-
poussis par des mains qui ont soudain quitte la navette pour s’armer du mousouet.

'Tous les bras, mime ceux des enfans, sont employes dans les teinturcries d'Ambi-
lakia; et, tandis que les hommes teignent le coton, les femmes lc filent et lc priparent...

‘II y a i Ambilakia vingt-quatre fabriques, oCi l’on teint chaque annie deux mille cinq
cents baltea dc coton, dc cent okes la balle. Cesdeux mille cinq centsballespasscnt toutes
en Allemagne, et sont distribuies k Pest, Vienne, Leipsik, Dresde, Anspach ct Barcuth.
Les marchands ambilakiotes ont des comptoirs dans toutes ccs villes, ct ils y dibitent
le coton aux manufacturicrs allemands.'

1 ‘Enlightened Europe'— >I>ixma^*vrj Evpdarrj —is one of Korals' key phrases. See, for
example, his use of it in a letter of the 8th November, j8«o, to the Chiot community at

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 183

‘Europe,’ 1 wrote Korais from Paris on the 8th November, 1810, to his
compatriots the Chiot settlers at Smyrna, ‘used to despise us as an un¬
educated nation, unworthy of our splendid forefathers_But now, since

you true sons of Hellas have thought of adorning Chios with scientific
learning, and the people of Kydhonifes [Ayvalyq] have done the same in
their town, and the people of Constantinople have been moved to acquire
knowledge, the Westerners have begun to take an interest in us and to
study our movements—our enemies in order to denounce these as the
lifeless convulsions of corpses, our friends in order to encourage them as
the struggles against Death of a people raised from the dead . . .

‘What we have learnt hitherto is good, and we ought to be grateful to
those who taught it, since they taught everything they knew. But the pre¬
sent state of Hellas demands something better, more systematic, more
profound, more useful; and this, without doubt, is to be found in the
learning of Europe, which many of our intellectual heroes have acquired
not long since [a list of names follows], and which many priests and dea¬
cons as well as many laymen arc seeking to acquire to-day for the profit
and glory of Hellas by travelling in Europe.’*

In his unwearyingly enthusiastic advocacy of education on Modern
Western lines, Korais—more fortunate than Voulgharis in his generation
—was preaching to the just converted ; J and, among Greek and Serb

Smyrna (Korais, A.: ‘Andidtopa ’fmoroAius'(Athens 1839, Rallis), p. 30), and in another
of the 17th June, 1824, addressed to the Rumcliot Greek brigand-patriot Odhyssefs
(ibid., p. «s). In Korais’ parlance, ‘Enlightened Europe’ means the secularized society
of the contemporary Western World.

* It is noteworthy that Korais uses the word ‘Europe’ in the cultural sense as a
synonym for ‘the West’, to the exclusion of the geographically European portion of the
domain of Orthodox Christendom. 1 Apdnthisma, pp. 35 and 39.

J Many schools and colleges were founded on Ottoman territory* by the private enter¬
prise of Greek Orthodox Christian ra'fyih —both individuals and communities—be¬
tween the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the Christian Era and the
Greek uprising of a.d. 1821. Schools had been founded before the close of the eighteenth
century at Arctsi in Bithynia and at Mcaolonghi—a Rumciian Venice inhabited by
Greek fishermen who gained their livelihood from lagoons at the mouth of the Aspro-
pdtamo (Achelflus) which also screened them from undue interference on the part of
their Ottoman masters (Sathas, K.: TovpKoxparovptv/ 'EXMs (Athens 1869, Koromilas),
PP- 459 - 6 o). In the Morca, schools were founded at Vytlna and other places between
a.d. 1800 and A.D. 182: (Khrysanthopoulos, Ph.: ‘ AirojivqiionvpaTa (Athens 1899,
SakelUrios, 2 vol*.), vol.«, p. 5)—perhaps partly under the inspiration of the college at
Tripolitsa, and the schools elsewhere, that had been maintained by the Venetians during
their occupation of the More* at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
(sec p. 169, above). A fuller account of the new schools founded in the Morca from A.D.
1781 onwards will be found in Sakellarios, op. cit., pp. 252-3. The most distinguished
of the Moreot schools, in this scholar’s judgement, was the school at Dhimitsina (ibid.,
p. 147). The Morca, however, was not in the van of the contemporary Greek educational
movement (ibid., pp. 146 and 2S3); and the foundation and support of the schools in
the Morea was largely the work of Moreot business men living abroad (ibid., p. 147).
Benefactions to Greek schools at Yinnina evoked from Korais in Pans a letter of the
20th March, 1803, in which he congratulated the donor Kaplinis and, in doing so, urged
him to ’set apart an annual sum ... for buying the most important new books published
in [Western) Europe’, and to ‘leave no stone unturned to provide two teachers, one of
French and one of Latin, or at least one teacher of Latin, which is almost as essential
as Greek’ (Apdnthisma, p. 213). A college for the teaching of a Western curriculum was
founded at Chios in a.d. 1809, under a headmaster who had been in France (David, op.
cit., p. 77). The founding of a school at Smyrna by the Chiot community there, on the
model of schools already established at Chios and Kydhoniis, was likewise the occasion
of Korais’ letter of the 8th November, tSro, cited on p. 182, n. 2, above. At Kydhoni*s
a college was founded in 1813 (Finlay, op. cit., vol. vi, p. 170), while at Athens in 18x2
a ’Philomusc Society’ was organized for the purpose of financing the education of Greeks
in the West (Finlay, op. cit., vol. vi, p. 98). On the 2:st November, 1S16, Korais wrote
from Paris to the trustees of the Greek secondary school at Chios: ‘Set up a printing
press. In France and Germany I know of humble villages which have been transformed

184 encounters between contemporaries

Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh alike, the newly acquired taste for a secular
Modern Western culture excited an ambition to shake off an Ottoman
yoke with a view to enjoying political freedom in accordance with some
Modern Western ideal. In the political circumstances in which they
found themselves, this was a formidable undertaking; for the Ottoman
millet-system, under which they had been living since the reign of
Sultan Mehmed II Fatih {imperabat a.d. 1451-81), was at the opposite
pole of the institutional gamut from the constitution of a secular Modern
Western state, either in its pre-Revolutionary pattern of Enlightened
Monarchy or in its post-Revolutionary pattern of Parliamentary
Democracy.

The Ottoman Millet-System of Communal Autonomy

Though the constitution of the Sultan’s Slave-Household was 'totali¬
tarian’ to the last degree, 1 the very efficiency that this total suppression
of the individual qul's personal liberty had instilled, in the institution’s
heyday, into a tiny Ottoman governing minority had made it possible
for this handful of rulers to allow the great majority of their subjects to
enjoy a far-reaching communal autonomy. While monopolizing the
control of armed forces, police, criminal justice, and finance, the Porte
was eager to save itself trouble by leaving other public business in the
hands of autonomous communities whose heads were appointed by the
P 5 dish§h and were personally responsible to him for the good behaviour
of their flocks. 2

This Ottoman communal autonomy had to be on a non-territorial
basis—not so much for the sake of safeguarding the political security of
an Ottoman Power which felt itself, in its prime, to be impregnable, as
because, in consequence of a scries of social catastrophes, 3 the divers
communities under Ottoman rule had come to be geographically inter¬
mingled with one another and at the same time economically differenti-

into splendid cities as soon as they had received the divine gift of printing’ ( Apdnthitma ,
pp. 214-15). In a letter written on the 12th October, 1822, to the Chiots, to encourage
them in their task of reconstruction after the catastrophe of A.D. 1822, he told them that
‘the true ornaments of churches are ecclesiastics adorned with education and nobility
of life ... and for such ornaments you must look, not to expensive edifices and marbles,
golden manuals, and other works of men’s hands, in which God does not make his
dwelling-place, but to secondary schools, libraries, printing, and all the other instru¬
ments of enlightenment and education’ (AptSnlhuma, p. 46). After the establishment of
the nucleus ot an independent Greek national state, we find Korals, true to his principles,
writing from Paris on the 5th January-, 1828, to President Capodistrias about books for
the nation, partly the gift of the brothers Zosimrfdhes, which had been purchased in
Western Europe and dispatched to NAvplia by Korals (Aftanthisma, pp, 265-8. See
further pp. 269-70 for a letter of the 1st March, 1829, to the same correspondent on the
same subject). « See the sketch of it in III. iii. 22-50.

1 This responsibility was brought home to the millet-bishy 1 of the Millct-i-ROm by
Sultan Murad IV when he put the Oecumenical Patriarch Cyril Loukaris to death on
the 26th June, 1638, for having failed to prevent the Don Cossacks from seizing Azov
(see pp. 156. above), and again by Sultan Mahmud II when he put to death the Oecumen¬
ical Patriarch Gregory on Easter Day the 22nd April, 1821, for having failed to prevent
the Moreots from rebelling against the Porte. From the Ottoman constitutional stand¬
point the execution of Gregory was a warrantable exercise of severity, since the Moreots,
unlike the Don Cossacks, were Ottoman subjects for whom the Oecumenical Patriarch
was responsible politically as well as ecclesiastically.

3 Chief among them being the disintegration of the main body of Orthodox Christen¬
dom and the recurrent irruptions of Eurasian Nomads into both South-Eastern Europe
and Asia Minor.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS i8 S
ated, till it had become hard to say whether they were nationalities,
occupational groups, or social classes. Though the Jews and the Roman
Catholics of the Latin Rite were perhaps the only communities of
Ottoman subjects that were entirely divorced from the cultivation of the
soil, the other communities likewise tended to become adepts in some
particular profession or craft 1 —which any of their adherents might
practise anywhere within the Ottoman frontiers—besides constituting
one element in the local peasantry of some particular region. The Greeks,
Vlachs, and Armenians, for example, like the Jews and the Latins, were
ubiquitous as men of business; the Greeks were also ubiquitous as
sailors and the Albanians as masons and latterly also as mercenary
soldiers, while the Vlachs had a wide range as shepherds, and the
Bulgars as military grooms and market gardeners. 2 The Ottoman system
of communal autonomy was admirably framed to meet this ‘geosocial’
situation; 3 for the division of powers between the autonomous com¬
munities and the Imperial Government was not territorial but functional.
On the one hand the communities did not share with the Porte any of
the four above-mentioned prerogatives of sovereignty, even in districts
in which their adherents happened to constitute a majority of the local
population; on the other hand the measure of self-government delegated
to them by the Porte was exercised by their communal authorities
throughout the Empire—with whose dominions the domain of each
autonomous community was thus in fact conterminous.

This network of autonomies—all conterminous with Ottoman
sovereignty and with one another—embraced all the Empire’s inhabi¬
tants; for, though the term ‘millet’ technically applied to non-Muslim
ra'iyeh only, a similar autonomy was enjoyed by the community of free
Muslim Ottoman subjects and also by the communities of resident aliens
together with their Ottoman protegds. The responsible headship of an
autonomous community was conferred—or imposed—by the Porte ex
officio on some appropriate ecclesiastical dignitary, if such was to be
found. The head of the free Ottoman Muslim community, for example,
was the Shcykh-cl-Islam ('Grand Mufti’) of Constantinople; the head
of the Ottoman Orthodox Christian community (Greek, Bulgar, Serb,
Ruman, Albanian, Georgian, QSramanly, and Arab, without distinction)
was the Oecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople; the head of the
Ottoman Gregorian (Armenian Monophysite) Christian community was
the Gregorian Patriarch of Constantinople; and so on. These Muslim,
Christian, and Jewish prelates (for the Jews, too, were organized in an
ecclesiastical corporation) were compelled by the Porte to accept politi¬
cal responsibility for co-religionists who were Ottoman subjects, even
when these were not members of their own ecclesiastical flock. The
Oecumenical Patriarch, for instance, as millet-b 5 shy of the Millct-i-

i Professional specialization is apt to be a retort to social penalization (see II. ii.
208-12). # _ 4 .See II. ii. 223.

> The situation was, of course, one of the familiar features of universal states, and
the Ottoman millet-system was built on foundations that had been laid successively by
the Achaemenian and Sasanian Empires and the Arab Caliphate in their efforts to cope
with previous presentations of the same political problem. The wealth of the historical
experience which the Ottoman millet-system thus incorporated was, no doubt, one of
the secrets of its long-continuing success.

186 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
RQm, was responsible politically to the Porte for Ottoman subjects who
were the spiritual subjects of the Oecumenical Patriarch’s ecclesiastical
peers the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, the Arch¬
bishop of Ochrida, and the President of the Autocephalous Church of
Cyprus, as well as for Ottoman subjects who were the spiritual subjects
of the Oecumenical Patriarchate itself; and, when the Gregorian Bishop
of Brusa was raised to the rank of Patriarch by Sultan Mehmed II Fatih
in a.d. 1461, he had to pay for this ecclesiastical aggrandisement by sub¬
mitting to be saddled with political responsibility for Christian ra'iyeh
who were not only outside his ecclesiastical jurisdiction but were not
even of the same communion. 1 The role played by these ecclesiastical
millet-b 5 shys of autonomous communities of Ottoman subjects was
played by the ambassadors of foreign Powers in the government of their
own nationals and proteges resident in the Ottoman Empire, and by the
Padishah himself in the government of a Slave-Household that was his
corporate instrument for exercising his sovereign powers. 2

It will be seen that the Ottoman Millet-i-Rum, just because its con¬
stitution was so well adapted to the social circumstances of the main
body of Orthodox Christendom in the Ottoman Age, was utterly unlike
any secular Modern Western political institution; and, as soon as the
Westernization of the 'Osmanlis’ Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh reached
a point at which it awakened political ambitions in their hearts, they
were faced with the question how they were to pass from this utterly
un-Western regime to some form of Modern Western political life.

« See Steen de Jehay, F. van den: De la Situation Ugale des Sujets Ottomans Non-
Mussulmans (Brussels 1906, Schepens). p. 62. In a.d. 1461 the newly created Gregorian
Patriarch was, in fact, made millet-bash 9 of all non-Orthodox Christian ra’iyeh in the
Ottoman Empire. Thereafter, in course of time, his political responsibility gradually
came to be restricted to Gregorian Christian Ottoman subjects by the Porte’s progressive
recognition de facto, though not in every case de jure, of the communal autonomy of the

{ aconite Monophysites, the Ncstorians, the Roman Catholics of divers ritca (Latins and
Jniate ex-Monotheletc Maronites, cx-Ncstorian Chaldeans, ex-Jacobites, and ex-
Grcgorians), and eventually also the Protestants. The patriarchal vicars of the Latin rite,
who administered the Latin Roman Catholic Ottoman community from a.d. 1599 on¬
wards (Steen de Jehay, op. cit., p. 308), were exceptional among the Ottoman millet-
bJLshJs in being non-Ottoman subjects appointed by an ecclesiastical authority, the Pope,
who was not an Ottoman subject either and whose sec lay outside the Ottoman Empire’s
frontiers. The Gregorian, like the Roman Catholic, subjects of the Porte were spiritual
subjects of an ecclesiastical authority who was not an Ottoman subject—in this case the
Gregorian Catholicos of Echmiazin, whose see was under Safawi Shi'i Muslim sove¬
reignty from a.d. 150X—2 onwards (see I. i. 371) and was ceded by Persia to Russia in
a.d. 1S28. The Catholicos, however, was impotent to give to the Gregorian Patriarch of
Constantinople the support and protection which the Constantinopolitan Patriarchal
Vicar of the Latin rite could be sure of receiving from the Vatican.

1 Though the ei-devant Christians from whom the Padishah’s Slave-Household was
recruited invariably became converts to Islam before being commissioned (see III. iii.
37, n. 1), the act of religious conversion did not depress these individually disciplined
and dedicated, and therefore politically all-powerful, Ottoman Muslim public slaves to
a political parity with their politically powerless free Muslim co-religionists. The
Padishah’s Household in its heyday was virtually an autonomous community in itself,
and Sultan Bayczid II ( imperabat a.d. 1481-1512) gave them the privilege of being
exempted from the jurisdiction of the shari' courts and being judged exclusively by their
own officers (Lybyer, A. H.: The Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of
Suleiman the Magnificent (Cambridge, Mass. 1913, Harvard University Press), p. 116).
The Seyyids (i.e. recognized claimants to descent from the Prophet Muhammad) like¬
wise virtually constituted a separate autonomous community of their own under the
headship of the Nakib el-Eshrif (Lybyer, op. cit., pp. 206-7; Rycaut, Sir Paul: The
Present Stale of the Ottoman Empire (London 1668, Starkey and Brome), pp. no-u).
See further, X. ix. 37.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 187
The Fiasco of the Phanariots' ‘Great Idea'

In the course of the century ending in a.d. 1821 the Phanariot Greek
entourage of the Oecumenical Patriarchate came to transmute their old
dream of resuscitating the East Roman ghost of the Roman Empire*
into a new dream of solving ‘the Western Question’ on the political plane
by converting the Ottoman Empire, as Peter the Great had converted the
Russian Empire, into a replica of such contemporary Western multi¬
national ‘enlightened monarchies’ as the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy
and the Kingdom of Sardinia; and this ambitious Phanariot Greek
political aspiration was fostered by an encouraging series of progressive
political successes.

In making the Oecumenical Patriarch ex officio millet-bashy of all the
Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh of an expanding Ottoman Empire, Sultan
Mchmed II Fatih and Sultan Selim I Yawuz had given this Constantino-
politan prelate political authority over Orthodox Christian peoples that
had never been under the rule of any Constantinopolitan emperor since
the Arab conquest of Syria and Egypt in the seventh century of the
Christian Era; 1 and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the
political power of the Phanar had been farther extended by the action
of their free Muslim fellow subjects. During the hundred years following
the death, in a.d. 1566, of Suleyman the Magnificent the free Muslims
had compelled the Padishah’s Slave-Household to take them into partner¬
ship in the government of the Ottoman Empire, and they had followed
up this political victory over the ci-devant Christian qullar by taking the
Greek ra'iyeh, in their turn, into partnership with themselves.

The creation of the offices of Dragoman of the Porte and Dragoman
of the Fleet, in order to employ Ottoman Greek ability in the Ottoman
service for redressing an adverse balance in the struggle between the
Ottoman Empire and the Western Powers, had been followed in the
eighteenth century' by measures in favour of the Greeks at the expense of
non-Greek Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh who had openly taken sides with
the ‘Osmanlis’ Hapsburg and Russian adversaries. During the no
years between the Ruman Prince Demetrius Cantcmir’s desertion to the
Russian camp in a.d. 1711 and the Greek Prince Hypsilandi’s crossing
of the Pruth in a.d. 1821, the Porte consistently appointed Phanariot
Greek instead of Ruman princes to the thronelets of Wallachia and
Moldavia. 3 In a.d. 1737, after the Serb Patriarch Arscnije IV had
followed the precedent, set in a.d. 1690 by his predecessor Arscnije III, 4
of inciting his flock to take up arms against the Porte in the Hapsburg
cause and subsequently seeking asylum in Hapsburg territory, the Porte
appointed a Greek to the vacant patriarchal throne of Ped; 5 and in a.d.
1766 the Porte suppressed both the Serb Patriarchate of Ped and the
West Bulgarian Archbishopric of Ochrida 6 and placed the non-Greek
flocks of both these hitherto ecclesiastically autonomous Orthodox
Christian churches under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of a Greek

I See VI. vii. 29-31. * On this point, see IV. iv. 622.

J See II. ii. 225, n. x. * See pp. 166-8, above.

s See IJadrovics, L.: L’Egtise Serbe tout la Domination 7 W?w (Pans 1947, Presse
Universitaires de France), p. 153. 1 See IV. iv. 622, n. 6.

188 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Oecumenical Patriarch who, as millet-bashy of the Millet-i-Rum, was
already politically responsible for them. The dependence on the
Phanariots into which the Porte had fallen by the close of the eighteenth
century for the conduct of ever more important diplomatic dealings with
ever more potent Western Powers is illustrated by the fact that, when in
a.d. 1793 the Porte established permanent diplomatic missions in Paris,
Vienna, London, and Berlin, it could find no Muslim 'Osmanlis com¬
petent to serve as ambassadors, and was compelled to appoint Greek
Christian charges d’affaires. 1

Between a . d . 1766 and a . d . 1821 the Phanariot Greeks might have
fancied that they had within their reach an ascendancy in the Ottoman
Empire of the kind that the contemporary King-Emperor Joseph II had
been working to secure for the Germans in the Danubian Hapsburg Mon¬
archy. By this time, however, the Phanariots’ apparently promising
political position had actually been undermined by repercussions of
revolutionary Western political events. In the first place, Enlightened
Monarchy—the one Modern Western political institution to which it
was practically possible for the Phanariots to accommodate themselves
—had been abruptly supplanted by Nationalism as the dominant politi¬
cal ideal in the West itself, 2 and in the second place the non-Greek
Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh of the Ottoman Empire foresaw no satisfac¬
tion for their own awakening national aspirations in the exchange of a
Turkish Muslim for a Phanariot Greek ascendancy—as the Rumanian
population of the Danubian Principalities showed when, after no years’
local experience of Phanariot Greek rule, they made a fiasco of Hypsi-
landi’s raid by turning a deaf ear to the Greek invader’s summons to
them to rally to him as fellow members of an Ottoman Orthodox

* See d’Ohsson, I. M.: Tableau GtnJral de rEmpire Ottoman (Paris 1788-1824, 7
vols.), voL vii (Didot), p. 573.

1 The victory of the ideal of Nationalism over the ideal of Enlightened Monarchy in
Ottoman Orthodox Christian soul* is reflected in the writings of Korais, who was as
ardently nationalist a* he was anti-Phanariot and anti-Byzantine.

In a letter addressed to a Greek National Delegation in London, he cite* the authority
of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and Bcntham, and quotes one of Franklin’s sayings
( Apanthisma , pp. 20-25). In a letter of the 4th July, 1S23, addressed to Alexander
Mavrogordito, on the new constitution of the infant Greek national state, he writes:
'Persuade our countrymen to adopt the institutions of the Anglo-Americans [i.e. the
people of the United States] (ibid., p. 255), and in the same letter he conveys his hostility
to the Phanariots, though this without discourtesy to his correspondent, through a
topical application of the text 'Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?' (ibid., p.
*S4>-

Korais' political convictions worked together with his linguistic and literary ideal* to
make him execrate the East Roman Empire.

'The yoke of the Romans, the Graeco-Roman Emperors and the Turks weighed each
more heavily than the last upon the Hellenes', he wrote in a letter of the 10th January,
1822, addressed to the leaders of the Greek national uprising ( Apdnlhisma , p. 4), and in
his letter of the 12th October, 1822, to the Chiots he declared that, 'if the Graeco-Roman
Emperors had given to the education of the race a small part of the attention that they
gave to multiplying churches and monasteries, they would not have betrayed the race to
other rulers far worse deluded than they were. For all the evils that we have suffered
from the maniac Muslims we are indebted to those material-minded and fleshly Christ¬
ian Emperors. Now that our turn has come, let us show ourselves wiser and truer
Christians than they did, and leam by the misfortunes which they suffered in their
generation and bequeathed to us.' ( Apanthisma , pp. 46-47)-

‘That macarone Phrantzfs! Reading three or four pages of him was enough to make
my gout worse! C'est une honour! And then we arc surprised that the Graeco-Roman
Empire fell!' ( Apdnthisma , p. 133).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 189

Christian community that was to liberate itself from the Ottoman yoke
by taking up arms under Phanariot Greek leadership. 1

The Disruption of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom by a Modern
Western Nationalism

This frustration of the Phanariots’ 'Great Idea’ was an intimation
that a multi-national Orthodox Christian Millet-i-Rum which had set
its heart on adopting a Modern Western way of life on the political as
well as on the educational plane would now have to sort itself out into
a patchwork of parochial Greek, Ruman, Serb, Bulgar, Albanian, and
Georgian national states—on the pattern of France, Spain, Portugal,
Holland, and Great Britain—in each of which a particular language,
instead of a particular religion, would be the shibboleth uniting 'fellow
countrymen’ and distinguishing them from ‘foreigners’, even though
these ‘foreigners’ might be Christians of the same Orthodox Faith who,
under the Ottoman dispensation, had been fellow members, ex officio
religionis, of the same empire-wide Millet-i-Rum.

At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the makings of
this exotic Modern Western pattern in the linguistic and political map
of the Ottoman Empire were exiguous. Within the Ottoman frontiers at
that date there were few districts whose population was even approxi¬
mately homogeneous in linguistic nationality, and few which possessed
even the rudiments of local statehood. Ottoman Orthodox Christian
autonomous territories could almost be counted on the fingers of one
hand: the tw r o Rumanian principalities Wallachia and Moldavia 1 and
the four Georgian principalities Guriel, Mingrelia, Imeretia, and
Abklmia would exhaust the list. The only other materials for building
Orthodox Christian national states out of the ruins of a disintegrating
Ottoman Empire were single communities—like the Greek and Moreot
Albanian islands and portlets noticed above 3 —which enjoyed some
measure of autonomy by charter, custom, or inadvertence, and barbarian
fastnesses—like the Mani, the Agrapha, 4 the Shumadiya, and Montene¬
gro—which had either never effectively been brought under Ottoman
rule or had effectively succeeded in casting it off. 5 The enduring political
effects of ephemeral eighteenth-century occupations of the Lower
Morava Basin by the Hapsburgs and of the Morea by the Venetians
declared themselves in the nineteenth century when these areas became
the nuclei of a Serb and a Greek national state. 6

Bulgarian and Albanian national states 7 were slower in making their

* This Rumanian reaction to Hypsilandi’s adventure, and it* decisive effect on the
Greek adventurer’s fortunes, have been noticed in II. ii. 227._

1 The adjoining principality of Transylvania had likewise been under Ottoman
suzerainty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Ottoman Power had
been at its apogee; but the Rumanian Orthodox Christian and Uniate element in the
population of Transylvania was not one of the politically enfranchised Transylvanian
‘nations’, though in numbers it may already have been equal to the Magyars, Szekels,
and Saxons put together.

3 On pp. t 7 . 4 - 5 . 4 Sce P- * 75 > n. 3, above.

s The nuclei of the Greek successor-state of the Ottoman Empire have been enumer¬
ated, by anticipation, in II. ii. 261-2. 8 Sec V. v. 637-8.

’ In Albania, by the time when she recovered her independence, the Orthodox
Christian element in the population had dwindled to a minority confined to the South.

190 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
appearance, and, when they did appear, they owed their foundation
to the action of foreign Powers. The Bulgarian successor-state of the
Ottoman Empire was brought to birth in a.d. 1877 by Russia and the
Albanian in a.d. 1913 by the Hapsburg Monarchy and Italy. Moreover,
all these ex-Ottoman Orthodox Christian national states came into
existence piecemeal, and the labour of winning a fragmentary autonomy
or independence had to be followed up by the further labour of bringing
the fragments together. 1 Moldavia had to be united with Wallachia,
Montenegro with Serbia, Eastern Rumelia with Bulgaria, an autonomous
Samos and an autonomous Crete with a nuclear Kingdom of Greece;
and the process of redistributing Ottoman territory into national
domains had to be completed by a dismemberment of Macedonia—the
most recalcitrant of all Ottoman territories to this painfully protracted
process of partition, just because Macedonia had been the quintessence
of the Ottoman Empire on the Rumelian side of the Straits.

This radical reconstruction of the political map of Ottoman Orthodox
Christendom, in order to make it conform to a revolutionary Modem
Western pattern, spelled misery for millions of human beings over a
period of four or five generations beginning at the outbreak of the Great
Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74 and ending only in the breathing-
space between the First and the Second World War; and the suffering
inflicted became more widespread and concurrently more intense as the
Procrustean operation was successively performed upon territories and
populations that were less and less amenable to being reorganized politically
on a basis of nationality in the Modern Western understanding of the
idea. 1 Even the Morea, as it was in a . d . 1821 , could not be made as
Greek as a contemporary France was French without exterminating a
previously dominant Ottoman Muslim minority, amounting to about
10 per cent, of the total population of the eyalet, 3 by a barbarous com¬
bination of eviction and massacre.

nXalvt fiavovXats yia iraiSid, yvvaixcs yid rods avrpfs,
xXaUi xai fua xavov/ucaa yid to fiovayoyid njs.*

This exultantly savage Orthodox Christian Greek Moreot paean on ;

the destruction of the tyrannical Muslim Albanian Moreot township of
Ldla in June 1821 s is characteristic of the inhuman spirit that inspired the
partition of the Ottoman Empire during the next hundred years. In a
world in which the existing communities were geographically inter¬
mingled and economically interdependent, an indigenous millet system
of communal organization, which had faithfully reflected this Ottoman

The Centre had become predominantly Muslim (see pp. 164-5, above), while the North
had remained predominantly Roman Catholic.

1 The apprenticeship which many of these fragments had to serve under Ottoman
suzerainty, as the price of being stamped with the seal of legitimacy by the Porte, has
been noticed in VI. vii. 16-17.

J SseH'H- 227 - 8 - . . . s See pp. 681-3, below. 1

* 0 1 AaAuunoots, in Polltis, N. G.: ExXcryal djro ra Tpayov&ia row 'EXAtjviKoG AaoD
(Athens 1914, Estia), p. 18: ‘Mothers weep for children, wives for their husbands, and
n lady [khanum] weeps for her only son.’

* On the 3 tst May, 1912, the ruins of Ldla were still lying desolate when the writer
of this Study walked past them that morning cn route from Olympia to Dhivri.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 191
society’s structure, could not be rejected in favour of an exotic ideology
of Nationalism, which reflected the quite alien structure of a Late
Modem Western Society, without precipitating an Ishmaelitish struggle
for existence. 1 In preaching to the hitherto widely dispersed speakers of
each of the interwoven languages of the Ottoman Empire that they had
a hitherto unheard-of sacred right to possess a sovereign independent
linguistically homogeneous national state of their own on the pattern of a
France or a Spain, the Ottoman Orthodox Christian apostles of a novel
Western political creed were, in effect, inciting their brethren to make a
virtue of evicting or massacring their neighbours for the crime of having
inherited a different mother tongue; and, in the name of an alien ideal
which had thus been imported in an evil hour, the shot-silk fabric of a
seamless Ottoman robe was remorselessly plucked to pieces by cruel
hands, and the broken threads of each diverse national hue were then
roughly rewoven into so many separate rags to make a patchwork coat
of many colours in which the only note of uniformity was a monoton¬
ously pervasive stain of blood. 2 A crescendo of atrocities and tragedies
came to its climax in the wholesale deportation of an Armenian minority
in the eastern vilayets in a.d. 1915 by order of a ‘New ‘Osmanli 1 govern¬
ment of the day, and the wholesale flight of a Greek Orthodox Christian

1 Gen. xvi. 12.

a Thi* morally devastating effect of the impact of a Modem Western Nationalism
upon an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom during this dark century of cx-Ottomon
Orthodox Christian history was aggravated by the vein of Archaism with which the
intrusive Western ideology had been charged, before export, by a Western Romantic
Movement. A partition of Macedonia between Bulgarian, Turkish, Greek, Albanian,
and Serbian national successor-states of the Ottoman Empire would have been difficult
enough to achieve without fearful injustices and atrocities, even if each of the interested
nationalities had scrupulously limited its claims to territories in which a majority of the
living generation of the inhabitants genuinely wished to be included in the claimant
nationality’s inchoate national state. The conflict between rival national claims, and the
malice, hatred, and all uncharitableness envenoming the feelings of the cx-Ottoman
Orthodox Christian peoples towards one another, were, however, further accentuated
by an Archaism which, instead of being content to take the living msp as the basis for
its territorial claims, insisted upon basing these on some perhaps quite ephemeral past
state of the map in which the political domination, as distinct from the national domain,
of this or that people had been at its maximum extent. The Serbs, for example, would
claim the frontiers of the fourteenth-century empire of Stephen Dushan; the Bulgars
would claim the frontiers of the tenth-century empires of Samuel and Symeon; the
Greeks would claim the frontiers of the eleventh-century empire of Basil the Bulgar-
slayer (BovAyapoterovos)—and this not as a multi-national empire in which the Greeks
were merely to exercise an ascendancy, but as a Greek national state that was to be ns
Greek as France was French.

The Ottoman Turks themselves, when the Turkish diaspora in Macedonia caught the
infection of an archaistic Western Nationalism from their insurgent Orthodox Christian
ra'iyeh, toyed with the conceit of seeking an ultra-archaistic compensation for n Rumili
which could never be saved for a Turkish national state, though it had been the heart
of an Ottoman Empire. Academic-minded Turkish archaist-nationalists cast back to a
pre-Islamic and pre-sedentary chapter in the history of a Eurasian Nomad minority
of their forebears (sec p. 262, n. 1, below). They consoled themselves for the loss of
Rumili by conjuring up the vision of Qyzyl Elma: a legendary Garden of Eden, in which
a primaeval Turkish people had eaten of the magic fruit of the Red Apple tree long
before Ertoghrul’s fugitive war-hand had been blown out of the Steppe by a Mongol
explosion. Were not at least two-thirds of the Turkish-speaking portion of Mankind still
to be found in Eurasia outside an Ottoman Turkey's frontiers? One of the most signal
evidences of Ghazi MustafS Kemil AtatQrk’s political genius was his clear recognition
that a visionary pursuit of this mirage of a Ycni TdrSn beyond the eastern limits of an
Ottoman Turkish national home in Anatolia w’as bound to bring Turkey into a disastrous
headlong collision with a Russia who had not indicated any relaxation of her hold upon
the Crimea, the Volga Basin, the Caucasus, and Central Asia in styling herself ’the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics’ instead of 'the Russian Empire’.

192 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
minority from Western Anatolia in a.d. 1922 after the debacle of in¬
vading Greek armies that had avenged Mehmed Fatih’s conquest of
Constantinople by overrunning the cradle of the Ottoman Power. It
was only after these supreme catastrophes that the sufferings of ‘dis¬
placed persons’ were mitigated by the beneficent intervention of the
League of Nations, and the national feud between Greeks and Turks was
brought to an end by the statesmanship of Elcftherios Veniz&os and
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. 1

Orthodox Christian national states that had come into existence in
these untoward circumstances and on this petty scale could not, of
course, indulge, like a Westernizing Russian Empire, in the ambition of
playing, vis-b-vis the Modern West, the role of the East Roman Empire
vis-b-vis a Medieval Western Christendom. Their feeble energies were
absorbed in local disputes over small parcels of territory, and, though
the territorial aspirations of the Serb and Rumanian national successor-
states of the Ottoman Empire were partly responsible for the break-up
of one great Modem Western state, the Danubian Hapsburg Mon¬
archy, 1 the bitterest animosities of these politically reanimated Orthodox
Christian peoples were those which they harboured against one another.
Even if the emergence of this cluster of Orthodox Christian national
states in South-Eastern Europe had been forestalled by a successful
realization of the Phanariots’ 'Great Idea’, a reconstituted East Roman
Empire could never have challenged the West on its own account, sup¬
posing that its makers had conceived the ambition; for it could never
even have come into existence, or kept itself in existence after being set
up, unless it had been established by Russian force of arms and been
maintained as Russia’s satellite. This did not come to pass, though the
Empress Catherine II of Russia played with the idea 3 after her great
victory over the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War of a.d.
1768-74. In the event the petty national states into which the Ottoman
Millet-i-Rum eventually sorted itself out in the course of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries found themselves in an international situation
not unlike that of their predecessors during the centuries immediately
preceding the establishment of a Pax Ottomanica in the main body of
Orthodox Christendom. In that age the Greeks, Serbs, Bulgars, and
Rumans had been confronted with a choice between domination by their
Medieval Western fellow Christians and domination by the ‘Osmanlis.
In a post-Ottoman Age the alternatives that confronted them were
incorporation into a secular Modern Western body social and subjection,
first to a Petrine, and thereafter to a Communist, Russia.

Russia's Competition with the West for the Ex-Ottoman Orthodox
Christians' Allegiance

In a.d. 1952 a majority of these non-Russian Orthodox Christian
peoples were actually under Russia's military and political control.
Georgia was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union;
Rumania, Bulgaria, and Albania were satellites of the Soviet Union. The

1 See VI. vii 30-31.

1 See II. ii. 177-88.

J See II. ii. 225, n 2.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 193
only two non-Russian Orthodox Christian countries which at this date
were not in Russia’s clutches were Greece—where the Russians had
eventually been worsted in an undeclared war-after-thc-war between
the Soviet Union and the United States in which the combatants on the
two sides had been Greek proxies of the foreign belligerents—and
Jugoslavia, which had thrown off a post-war Russian hegemony without
having been overtly molested up to date; and even Jugoslavia, whose
rulers had not repudiated Communism in repudiating their allegiance to
Moscow, had found herself, like Greece, unable to keep Russia at bay
out of her own resources, without drawing upon American aid. At the
same time it was significant that, save for the single case of Georgia, 1
this Russian domination over non-Russian Orthodox Christian countries
had been established only since the end of the General War of a.d.
I 939 — 451 ! ^ at even an indirect exercise of Russian power was every¬
where odious to all but a small minority of Communists who were
governing these countries with Russian backing as the Soviet Govern¬
ment’s agents; that the Jugoslav Communists had already rebelled
against the hegemony of their Russian comrades; and that this recalci¬
trance against a Russian ascendancy was an old story which could be
illustrated from the history of Russia’s relations with Rumania, Bulgaria,
and Serbia in the nineteenth century, at dates long previous to the
metamorphosis of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union.

On the morrow of the Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1877-8, for example,
Russia had looked forward, with a not unreasonable confidence, to
exercising a paramount political influence over a Serbia whom she had
just rescued from a single-handed struggle with Turkey, over a Rumania
to whom she had just presented the Dobruja, and, above all, over a
Bulgaria whom she had just brought into existence ex nihilo through
the sheer force of Russian arms. Yet, in the sequel, Bulgaria shook off
Russia’s tutelage at the first opportunity, Serbia veered back for a genera¬
tion (a.d. 1881-1903) into the political orbit of the Hapsburg Monarchy,
and Rumania—forgetting the acquisition of the Dobruja and only re¬
membering that, in exchange for this piece of Ottoman territory, Russia
had forced her to retrocede the fraction of Bessarabia that had been

1 The United Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti, which was the largest and most important
of the Georgian states, placed itself under Russian suzerainty in a.d. 1783; was annexed
by Russia at the turn of the years a.d. 1800 and A.D. 1801 (the exact date is variously
given as cither the 18th December, 1800, or the 18th January, 1801); and was finally
subdued, after a last rebellion, in a.d. 1812. The Principality of Mingrelia was annexed
by Russia in A.D. 1803 and the Principality of Imerctia in A.D. >804-10. Persia renounced
in Russia’s favour all claims over Kartli-Kakheti, Mingrelia, Imerctia, and Abkhazia in
the Russo-Persian peace treaty concluded at Gulistan in a.d. 1813. Turkey recognized
Russian sovereignty over Kartli-Kakheti, Mingrelia, and Imerctia, and also over Guriel,
in the Russo-Turkish peace treaty concluded at Adrianople on the 14th September,
1829, Art. 4. In the same article Turkey ceded to Russia the town of Akhaltzik and the
fort of Akhalkalak. Details will be found in W. E. D. Allen: 'The Caucasus’, in The
Bailie and Caucasian Stales (London 1923, Hoddcr and Stoughton), pp. 195-9, and in
the same author’s A History of the Georgian People (London 1932, Kegan Paul), pp.
210-18.

The Russian annexation of Georgia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, like
the French conquest of Corsica in a.d. 1768, had the unforeseen effect of providing a
political genius born in the annexed territory with a field for his abilities and ambitions
which would have been closed to him if his obscure and secluded homeland had not
been swallowed up by an acquisitwe Great Power. No more would have been heard of
Stalin as a Georgian priest than of Napoleon as a Corsican patriot.

B 28 M.vm H

194 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
presented to Rumania by the victors in the Crimean war*—came to look
upon Russia, instead of Turkey, as her national bugbear. 2

This anti-Russian feeling in non-Russian Orthodox Christian
countries might seem at first sight surprising at a time when Orthodox
Christianity was still the established religion of a Russian state that
claimed to be the heir of the East Roman Empire. In the ninth-century
Macedonian Slav dialect known as ‘Old Slavonic’ the Russian, Ruman¬
ian, 3 Bulgarian, and Serbian Orthodox churches had a common liturgi¬
cal language, while the Russian, Bulgar, and Serb peoples were also
more intimately linked by the kinship between their living Slav vernacu¬
lars. Why did ‘Pan-Slavism’ and 'Pan-Orthodoxy' prove of so little
avail to Russia in her dealings with the Slavonic-speaking and other

1 Bessarabia—the slice of territory between the Rivers Dniestr and Pruth—had been
divided under the Ottoman regime into two parts: the Rujiq, on the Black Sea Coast,
which was under Nomad occupation and Ottoman administration, and an inland part
which was cultivated by a Rumanian and Ukrainian peasantry and was an integral por¬
tion of the autonomous principality of Moldavia. In a.d. 1812, Russia had compelled
the Porte to cede both parts of Bessarabia to her as the price of peace at the end of the
Russo-Turkish War of 1807-12 (Russo-Turkish peace treaty concluded at Bucarest on
the 28th May, :81a, Art. A

1 This substitution of Russia for Turkey as the principal foreign object of the
Rumanian people’s dislike and apprehension was a natural consequence of this particular
Orthodox Christian nation’s situation and history. Situated, as they were, in the fairway
of Russia’s overland avenue for the invasion of Rumelia, the Rumans had been the first
Ottoman Orthodox Christian people to have a first-hand experience of a Russian
‘liberating’ army; and they had also been the only Ottoman Orthodox Christian people
that had escaped the experience of bcinp subject to a local Muslim ‘ascendancy’. The
treaties under which the two Ruman principalities Wallachia and Moldavia had origi¬
nally submitted to Ottoman suzerainty had provided that they should be exempt from
colonization by Muslims and should continue to be governed by Christian princes; and
consequently the misgovemment and oppression from which they had suffered under an
Ottoman dispensation had been inflicted on them first by Ruman Orthodox Christian
and later by Greek Orthodox Christian, but never directly by Turkish Muslim, hands.
In these circumstances it is not surprising that in A.D. 1711, when a Russian army made
its appearance in the Lower Danube Basin for the first time since Svyatoslav’s retreat
in a . d . 971 or 972 (see p. 127, n. 2, above), the Rumans should have shown reserve,
whereas the Montenegrins and Herzegovinians rose in arms at the arrival, not of a Rus¬
sian army, but of a mere inflammatory scrap of Russian paper in the shape of a pro¬
clamation. It is true that in a.d. 1711 the Hospodar of Moldavia, Demetrius Cantemir,
did throw in his lot with the Russians (see p. 162, above), and that there was a party in
favour of the same policy in the more distant, as well as more important, principality
of Wallachia; but the Hospodar of Wallachia, Constantine Brflncovcanu, refused to
commit himself and eventually came down on the side of his Ottoman suzerain, and in
this policy he seems to have had behind him a majority of the Wallachian boyars. 'As one
of them said: “It is dangerous to declare for Russia until the Tsar’s army crosses the
Danube. Who knows, moreover, whether Wallachia in the power of the Russians will
be happier than under the dominion of the Turks ?” After the battle on the Pruth, one
of Brancovan’s (BrSncovcanu’s) close adherents wrote in praise of his wisdom in "await¬
ing the decision of a battle in which it has finally been seen that, beneath German clothes,
the Muscovites arc still Muscovites’’. Here in two nutshells is summed up the reason for
Peter’s failure to win Wallachia’ (Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire
(Oxford 1949. Blackwell), p. 44, where the reader will find the references to the sources
of the two dicta quoted above).

1 In the Rumanian principalities, ‘Old Slavonic’ continued to be the sole current
liturgical language of the Orthodox Christian Church down to A.D. 1679, when the Metro¬
politan of Moldavia, Dosithcos, published at Jassy a translation of the Liturgy into
Rumanian. The Bible likewise was translated into Rumanian in A.D. :688. The intro¬
duction of the Rumanian version of the Liturgy encountered opposition, and in the
reign of Prince Constantine Brlncoveanu of Wallachia (funeebatur a.d. 1688-1714) there
w-as a reaction in favour of the 'Old Slavonic’ classical language. Thereafter, Greek
ousted 'Old Slavonic’ as the language of higher secular education in the principalities,
while 'Rumanian remnined the language of the Liturgy’ Uorga, N.: Geschichte der
Rumanen und Hirer Kultur (Hermannstadt [Sibiul 1929, Krafft and Drotleff). pp. 233-4
and 239-40).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 195
Orthodox Christian peoples to whom she repeatedly gave such effective
help in their struggles to extricate themselves from Ottoman toils ?

The answer appears to be that the Ottoman Orthodox Christians had
already fallen under the spell of the Modern Western Civilization before
Russia had offered herself to be their champion and redeemer, and that
Russia was attractive to them—in so far as she did attract them at all—
neither because she was Slav nor because she was Orthodox but because
she was a pioneer in a cultural enterprise of ‘winning the West’ which
was the goal of their own ambitions. The closer their acquaintance with
Russia, the more alive the non-Russian Orthodox Christian peoples
became to the superficiality of a Petrine Russia’s Western veneer.
'Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar!’ 1 However much these
former ra'iyeh might be indebted to Russia for their liberation from an
Ottoman yoke, it was natural that they should take advantage of their
newly gained liberty by going straight to the Western fountain-head
instead of being content to receive the living waters of the West through
a mud-choked Russian channel. This is perhaps the explanation of the
apparent paradox that the prestige of Russia in Greek, Ruman, Serb,
and Bulgar eyes diminished in proportion as Russia became a more
familiar figure and a more potent presence in these South-East European
Orthodox Christian peoples’ lives.

Russian influence over them was, in fact, at its apogee in the genera¬
tion immediately following the Great Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1768-
74. The decisive victory' over a once irresistible Ottoman Power that had
been won in this war by Russia thanks to her adoption of a Modern
Western military technique was as thrilling for the ‘Osmanlis’ ra'iyeh
as it was disconcerting to the ‘Osmanlis themselves; and, though the
Russian naval expeditionary force in the Mediterranean had done the
Morcot Greeks a poor service by irresponsibly inciting them to revolt
without being able to give them effective aid against the avalanche of
Albanian Muslim barbarians whom the ‘Osmanlis let loose upon them
in retaliation, 2 the moral effect of this unfortunate Greek experience of
Russian intervention was more than offset by the Russians’ naval and
military successes in the war and by the vigour of their political exploita¬
tion of the terms of peace.

The peace treaty concluded at Kuchuk Qaynarja on the 21st July,
1774, stipulated (Art. 11) that Russia was to have the same treatment,
rights, and status in the Ottoman dominions as were enjoyed at the time
by France and Great Britain, just as if the terms of the French and
British capitulations then in force had been incorporated in the treaty
verbatim, and it was provided in the same article that Russian consulates,
on the same footing as the French and British consulates, might be
established at any place in Ottoman territory. In the subsequent Russo-
Turkish commercial treaty of the 21st June, 1783, it was expressly agreed 1

1 *It will take the Russians a long time to shake off from themselves the habits and
way of thought inherited from a barbarous ancestry. Gratia It Ruue et vout trouvertz It
Tar tare, (a c'etl une intulte aux Tartares. This is a hackneyed expression; however, it is
a true one’ (Burnaby, F.: A Ride to Khiva (in a.d. 1875] (London 1877, Cassell), p. 82).

J Sec V. v. 294. Details will be found in Sakcllarios, op. cit. pp. 162-204.

196 encounters between contemporaries

that Russian consuls should have the right, already enjoyed by the
representatives of other capitulatory Powers, 1 of maintaining tax-free
and otherwise privileged Ottoman servants. Russia made it her policy
to exploit these treaty rights by using Greek Ottoman subjects as her
instruments. Ottoman Greeks, selected by Russian consuls in the
Ottoman Empire, were sent to Russia to be educated at the Russian
Government’s expense, 2 and from a.d. 1818 onwards Greeks were
appointed to Russian consulships. 3 Ships belonging to Orthodox
Christian Ottoman subjects were licensed by the Russian authorities to
trade under the Russian flag*—a favour which gave the first impetus
to the boom in Greek shipping that reached its peak during the Revolu¬
tionary and Napoleonic Wars.* ....

In the generation immediately preceding the Greek national uprising
of a.d. 1821 the new maritime cities founded by the Russian Govern¬
ment on the north coast of the Black Sea, 6 after the acquisition of this
seaboard by Russia in the Russo-Turkish wars of a.d. 1768-74 and a.d.
1787-92, played an important role in the emancipation of the Greeks as
clinics in which Greek ra'iyeh were inoculated with a revolutionary
Western political ferment. The trade through these newly founded ports
which sprang up between their Russian continental hinterland and the
Ottoman shores of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean not only brought
Ottoman Greek shipping into their harbours but attracted permanent
Greek residents; and the Greek commercial colony at Odessa gave birth
in a.d. 1814 to ‘the Society of Friends’ (•PiXucri 'Eraiptla), a Greek
nationalist secret society which set itself to conduct an underground
propaganda in Greek-inhabited Ottoman territories. The Greeks serving
as Russian consuls in the Ottoman Empire

‘were all initiated into the Etaireia ton Philikbn and acted as mission¬
aries themselves, and their propaganda found acceptance among the rest
of the Greeks and won their confidence, because everybody believed that
Russia was inextricably involved in these activities and that she would take
part in the Greek conflict.’ 7

These words were written in retrospect by Photdkos Khrysanth6pouIos,
who played his part in the subsequent Greek War of Independence as
aide-de-camp to Kolokotronis; and the story of Photikos’s early life is a
personal illustration of the stimulus imparted to Ottoman Greeks by
contact with Russia in this generation.

Photdkos, as he records in his memoirs, 8 was the son, born in a.d.
1798, of a Moreot Greek Orthodox Christian priest. His native village
was Maghouliana in the interior of the peninsula, and he received a
Greek primary education there before going on to the recently founded
Greek higher school at Vytlna. By this date the Moreot Greeks were
becoming political-minded.

« See pp. 172-3. above. 1 Sec Finlay, op. cit., vol. y, p. 267.

1 See Khrysanthdpoulos, Ph.: Vtwo/ivjjMOKv/xara (Athens 1899, Sakellarios, 2 vole.),
vol. i, p. 16.

* See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, pp. 280-1. * Sec pp. 175-7. above.

6 Kherson was founded in A.D. 1778, Nikolayev in A.D. 1789, Odessa in A.D. 1792.
» Khrysanthdpoulos, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 16.

* Khrysanthdpoulo*. op. cit., Introduction, vol. i, pp. ix-xiii.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 197

‘It was customary for all the inhabitants of a village or a small country-
town to meet after the end of divine service. They came out of church,
stopped in the churchyard, and talked together there; and, if the more
intelligent among them happened to have heard any foreign news—per¬
haps about a war between the Westerners (QpayKOi) and the Turks—they
used to tell it, and everybody was pleased, above all when it was Russia
that had won a battle. When that happened, they used to join with the
priest in a prayer to God to give our co-religionists strength to overthrow
our enemies the Turks.’ 1

At Vytfna in this atmosphere the young Photdkos imbibed political
ideas which made his father anxious to get the boy out of the country
for fear that he might fall foul of the Turks; and so, in a.d. 1813,
Photikos was taken, with other young Moreot Greeks, to Russia by a
Moreot business man, established there, who had been back in the
Morea on a visit. In Russia Photakos went into business in the inland
Bessarabian town of Kishinydv, but, hearing of the existence of the
Philikl Etaircfa, he migrated to Odessa and was initiated. In a.d. 1820 he
was sent by the society as their emissary to the Morea to pass the word
that the 25th March, 1821, was to be ‘the day’. His expenses were paid
by a rich Odcssan Greek business man, and he sailed from Odessa to
Hydhra on board an Hydhriot ship.

Photikos’ account of the effect of life in Russia on himself and his
compatriots is as convincing as it is vivid:

'The Greeks . . . always longed to go to Russia. There we could work
and earn our bread and after a time forget our fear and cease to be ra'iyeh
of the Turks. We could cleanse ourselves inside and outside, realise that
we were human beings, walk with a confident step, and catch the new
atmosphere from one another. We could hear the bells of the churches
ringing freely; we could go to their churches and give thanks in the liturgy
of our religion with a devotion that came from the heart. And, when we
had taken our fill of all these blessings, we could begin to consider how to
liberate our parents, brothers, and relatives and our beloved country, so
that she too might recover her splendour, like Russia.

'This terrible mental cancer prayed upon our lives, and we could never
conclude our reflections without our eyes being clouded with tears. Why
should we be slaves of the Turks, the most barbarous nation in the World ?
This weeping and lamentation of ours, and all our other miseries, filled
every place where Greeks were gathered together. Equality, fraternity,
loyalty, and mutual affection were general among us, and after the day’s
work we were continually meeting in our leisure hours and discussing
the liberation of our country. Everyone sent his savings to his birthplace,
to his parents and other relatives; and he sent his native commune and
the village church a few books, a little lamp, or a little bell. And so we
continued for the present. There in Russia our national consciousness
grew, and our hearts burnt unqucndhably within us. Had Russia not been
there, or had she been another nation with another religion, it is question¬
able whether we should have secured our liberation or preserved our
nationality. Where else, indeed, should we have brought our embryonic
liberty to birth ?’*

* Khrys*»nth6poulos, op. cit., vol. i, p. 35 ! C P- P- * 5 -

* Khry*anth< 5 pou!o», op. cit., vol. i, pp. 16-18.

198 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

In Russia, on this new ground so lately won from Nomadism for the
agriculture, commerce, and industry of a sedentary civilization, Otto¬
man Greek immigrants at the opening of the nineteenth century ex¬
perienced the exhilaration of breathing fresh air; but, if Phdtakos is a
faithful interpreter of their state of mind, they were still unaware of the
source of the life-giving breeze. Though they were inhaling it within the
expanding borders of a Russian Orthodox Christendom, its provenance
was not Russia and its ozone was not Orthodoxy. The mighty rushing
wind that was sweeping out of the Russian forests across the Ukrainian
steppes and over the sea to Greece had not been raised by any local
atmospheric conditions; it had come from afar, and a scientific inquirer
bent on tracing it back to its origin would have had to make a pilgrimage
from Odessa northwards overland to Riga, and from Riga westwards
overseas, to find the distant source of this spiritual elixir in Holland and
Britain and America. The atmosphere in early nineteenth-century
Russia that inspired the Ottoman Greeks was a Western atmosphere to
which Russia was merely giving passage; and in succumbing to this
atmosphere they were opting, even if unconsciously, not for Russia, but
for the West.

3. The Modern West and the Hindu World 1

Likenesses and Differences in the Situations of a Hindu Society under
British Rule and an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom

The circumstances in which the Hindu World encountered the
Modern West were in some points remarkably similar to those in which
the main body of Orthodox Christendom underwent the same experience.
The Hindu World, too, had entered into its universal state by the time
when the impact of the Modern Western Civilization upon it began to
make itself felt there; 2 in India, as in the non-Russian part of Orthodox
Christendom, this universal state had been imposed by alien empire-
builders who were children of the Iranic Muslim Civilization; and in

« Sec xi, maps 52A and S3.

* If we arc right in our view that a universal state was imposed on the Hindu World
by alien hands in the form of the Timurid Mughal Empire, and also right in equating
the effective establishment of the Mughal Rij with Akbar’s conoucst of Gujerat in
a.d. 1572. this event in Hindu history did not occur till seventy-four years after the
first landfall of Western ocean-faring mariners on the west coast of the sub-continent;
but da Gama’s arrival at Calicut in A.D. 1498 did not produce the sensation in India that
it produced in Venice and in Egypt, where it was immediately realized that the rounding
of the Cape of Good Hope by Portuguese ships was a threat to all parties commercially
interested in the traditional short route between India and Western Europe via the In¬
dian Ocean snd the Levant. The continental-minded Central Asian Muslim conquerors
of the interior of the Indian sub-continent were as insensitive to landfalls on the
coast as they were sensitive to passages of the Hindu Kush; and, though their latest
representative, the Timurid Mughal empire-builder Bibur, crossed the Hindu Kush
only six years, and descended from Kabul upon the Panjab only twenty-one years, after
da Gama had arrived in India by sea, there is no mention of the Portuguese explorer’s
feat in the memoirs of the Central Asian soldier. Even in the eyes of Babur’s grandson
Akbar, the founder of the Mughal Rfij, the handful of Westerners squatting on sufferance
in one or two ports on the fringes of his enormous realm were still little more than
objects of curiosity as the pedlars of ingenious toys and the missionaries of an interesting
religion. Indeed, the impact of the West on Mughal India hardly began to make itself felt
seriously before the Mughal power had begun to go into decline after the death of
Awrangzib in A.D. 1707.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 199
Mughal India, as in Ottoman Orthodox Christendom, the subjects of
these Muslim rulers were feeling the attraction of their masters’ alien
culture at the time when the Modem West appeared above their horizon,
but subsequently transferred their cultural allegiance to this later-risen
star as the West manifestly increased and the Islamic Society manifestly
decreased in potency. These striking points of similarity between the
two situations throw into relief, however, certain not less striking points
of difference.

For example, when the Ottoman Orthodox Christians made the cul¬
tural change of front in which they turned away from the Ottoman to¬
ward the Modern Western way of life, they had to overcome a traditional
antipathy to the West which had become ingrained in the hearts of their
ancestors as a result of an unfortunate experience of the West in a

S revious encounter with it in its medieval phase. By contrast, the
lindus, in their corresponding cultural reorientation, had no such un¬
happy memories to live down; for the encounter between the Hindu
World and the West that began on the day when da Gama made his
landfall at Calicut was virtually the first contact that had ever occurred
between these two societies.

Moreover, this difference in the antecedents is overshadowed by a still
more important difference in the sequel. In the history of a non-Russian
Orthodox Christendom the alien universal state which this society
brought upon itself 1 remained in the hands of its original Iranic Muslim
founders until it went into dissolution after reaching its natural term. An
Ottoman Empire which fell on evil days before the close of the sixteenth
century, when its classical regime of government through the PSdishah’s
Slave-Household broke down after the death of Suleyman the Magnifi¬
cent, was restored in the course of the seventeenth century when, under
the leadership of the House of Kdprulu, the free Muslim community in
the Empire took over the reins of government 2 and secured effective
assistance in its formidable task by taking the Phanariot leaders of a sub¬
ject Orthodox Christian community into a junior partnership with it¬
self. 3 The Mughal Empire achieved no corresponding recover}’ from the
similar anarchy into which it fell after the death of Awrangzib, and,
while the Hindu, like the Orthodox Christian, universal state lived out its
life to the term of its natural expectation and likewise remained to the
end in alien hands, there was in this case a transfer of control from one
pair of alien hands to another.

The empire which the Timurid war-lords’ feeble successors failed to
hold together was reconstituted by British business men who stepped
into Akbar’s shoes when they became aware that the framework of law
and order in India, without which no Westerners could carry on their
trade there, was going to be restored by the French if the British did not

* The subjugation of the main body of Orthodox Christendom by the 'Osmanlis ia
accounted for by the contemporary native historians Dhotikas and Phrantzls as being
God’s judgement on His Orthodox Christian people for their sins; and this verdict may
be accepted by an historian who does not believe that the Orthodox Christians were in any
special sense God’s Chosen People if the particular sins for which the Orthodox Christ¬
ians had to pay this price may be identified with the two political vices of autocracy and
factiousness. 1 See V. vi. 208-9.

J Sec II. ii. 222-8; III. iii. 47-48; V. v. 154-5; «nd PP- *62-3, above.

200 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
forestall these rivals by doing the work themselves. Thus the Westerniza¬
tion of the Hindu World entered on its critical stage in a period in which
India was under Western rule, and in consequence the reception of the
Modern Western culture was initiated in India, as in Russia, from above
downwards, and not from below upwards, as in an Ottoman Orthodox
Christendom.

The Reception of a Modern Western Culture and its Political Consequences

In this situation the Brahman and Banya castes of the Hindu Society,
between them, succeeded in playing the part in Hindu history for which,
in non-Russian Orthodox Christian history, the Phanariot Greeks made
an unsuccessful bid. Under all political regimes in India, one of the
prerogatives of the Brahmans had been to serve as ministers of state.
They had played this part in the Indie World before playing it in an
affiliated Hindu Society; and, after the breakdown of the Hindu
Civilization in the twelfth century of the Christian Era 1 and the subse¬
quent progressive intrusion of Iranic Muslim invaders into a disintegrat¬
ing Hindu Society’s domain, 3 these alien intruders found it convenient,
if not indispensable, to follow in this point the practice of the Hindu
states which they were supplanting. Brahman ministers and minor offi¬
cials in the service of Muslim rulers made this alien rule less odious than
it would otherwise have been to the Hindu majority of these Indian
Muslim princes’ subjects, because these Brahman intermediaries under¬
stood how to handle their fellow Hindus and at the same time enjoyed
a prestige in their eyes which reconciled the rank-and-file to following
the dominant caste’s lead in accommodating themselves to an irksome
alien political yoke. In making this use of the Brahmans the Mughal R 5 j
followed the precedent of the parochial Indian Muslim states whose
former dominions it had united under its own rule, and the British R 5 j,
in its turn, followed the precedent of the Mughal Raj, 3 while British
economic enterprise in India, both public and private, opened up
corresponding opportunities for the Banyas.

As a consequence of the transfer of the government of India to British
hands, the policy of the British regime in making English, instead of
Persian, the official language of the Indian imperial administration, and
giving Western literature a preference over Persian and Sanskrit litera¬
ture as a medium of Indian higher education, 4 had as great an effect on
Hindu cultural history as was made upon Russian cultural history by the
Westernizing policy of Peter the Great. In the Hindu, as in the Russian,
Society, Western letters, and, with them, a veneer of Western life, came
into vogue among the dominant classes through the fiat of an autocratic
oecumenical government and not through the personal initiative of
private individuals, which was the agency through which the ra'tyeh of
the Ottoman Porte had made themselves acquainted with the Modern

* See IV. iv. 99-100. * See xi, maps 44 and 45.

3 In enlisting the services of Hindus in the administration of British India, the British
authorities did not deliberately give the Brahmans any special preference, but the
Brahmans’ hereditary ascendancy in the Hindu Society enabled them once again to
secure the lion’s share of the opportunity for themselves.

* For these measures, see V. v. 516, n. 1 and VI. vii. 243.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 201
Western culture. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Porte
appointed Phanariot Greeks to posts of high responsibility and influence
in the Ottoman public service because these Phanariots were already
familiar with a Western World with which the Porte now found itself
constrained to transact business. In the nineteenth century, high-caste
Hindus went in for a Western education because a British regime in
India had ruled that a familiarity with the English language and litera¬
ture should be the key to entry into the British Indian public service.

While the Westernization of India thus proceeded from above down¬
wards on lines originally laid down by a British Raj primarily for its
own administrative purposes, the process did not remain confined within
limits that would have sufficed for the supply of minor civil servants to
‘the Serkar’ and subordinate clerks to private British business houses.
The governmental and commercial life of India could not be put upon a
Western basis without introducing a Western leaven into Indian life over
a wider range. The Westernization of Indian business and government
called into existence in India two Western liberal professions, the
University Faculty and the Bar; and in a Westernized Indian business
activity based on private enterprise the most profitable openings could
not be made a monopoly for European British subjects, as the highest
positions in the Indian Civil Sen-ice were reserved for them in effect
down to a.d. 1917. In these circumstances the Hindu community showed
its ability by successfully turning its administrative, legal, and com¬
mercial talents to account under the exotic conditions set by a Western
commercial and political ascendancy; and, long before the transfer of
the government of India from English to Indian hands in the course
of the thirty years a.d. 1917-47, there had grown up in India a new class
of Westernized Hindu lawyers, business men, and industrialists as well
as Westernized Indian members of the Imperial public service.

It was inevitable that this new element in the Hindu Society, whose
distinctive characteristic was its Western education, should aspire, as in
Ottoman Orthodox Christendom the Phanariot Greeks had aspired in
their day, to take over the oecumenical empire under which they were
living from the alien hands by which it had been built, and to turn it
into one of the parochial states of a Westernizing World on the constitu¬
tional pattern prevalent at the time at which this political ambition took
conscious shape. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
the Phanariots had dreamed an already anachronistic dream of turning
the Ottoman Empire into an eighteenth-century Western enlightened
monarchy. 1 At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the
Westernizing political leaders of the Hindu World paid homage to a
change in Western political ideals by setting themselves the far more
difficult task of turning the British Indian Empire into a democratic
Western national state.

At a date less than five years after the completion of the transfer of the
Government of India from English to Indian hands on the 15th August,
1947, it was still far too early to attempt to forecast the outcome of this
momentous political enterprise; but it was already possible to say that
« See VI. vii. 29-31, and pp. 187-9, »bove.

202 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Hindu statesmanship had been more successful than foreign well-wishers
could have dared to hope in its efforts to salvage as much as possible
of the political unity that had been perhaps the most precious British
gift to an Indian sub-continent.

As the transfer of political power had become imminent, this political
unity had come into danger of being disrupted by two fissures in Indian
political life which had been politically more or less innocuous so long
as the Raj had been held in British hands. One of these fissures was the
geographical division of India between territories of two political categor¬
ies: the British Indian provinces and the autonomous Indian princi¬
palities that were in treaty relations with the British Government. The
other was the non-territorial division of India between two geographi¬
cally intermingled communities, the Hindus and the Indian Muslims,
and the further subdivision of the Hindu community, likewise on non¬
territorial lines, into a number of castes, ranging from Brahmans to
‘Untouchables’. These two lines of division cut across one another, and
they were also of different age and unequal gravity. The geographical
division between provinces and principalities was an accidental legacy
of the history of the British conquest of India in the course of a hundred
years beginning with the British occupation of Bengal at as recent a date
as a.d. 1757-60. On the other hand the communal division of the people
of India into a Hindu and a Muslim millet was as old as the Iranic
Muslim conquest of Hindustan towards the close of the twelfth century
of the Christian Era, 1 while the communal sub-division of the Hindu
millet into castes was a legacy from the history of the antecedent Indie
Civilization. It was not surprising that the Government of the Indian
Union that came into existence on the 15th August, 1947, should have
dealt more successfully with the problem of the princes than with the
problems of the Muslim millet and the Depressed Classes; it was, how¬
ever, remarkable that the existence of these two communal problems
should not have worked greater havoc than it did work at this critical
moment in Indian liistory.

By the year a.d. 1952 the Central Government of the Indian Union
had already imposed its authority, by a show of force, on the Deccani
state of Hyderabad, which was by far the largest, most populous, and
most powerful of all the autonomous principalities inherited by the
Indian Union from the British Raj within the frontiers with which the
Union had emerged as a fully self-governing state member of the British
Commonwealth of Nations; and it was actively engaged in carrying out
a Gleichschaltung of the rest. This merger of the existing principalities
in the new Union was not inequitable—whatever the princes’ legal rights
might be—since Indians who were subjects of ex-client princes of a
former British Raj had as strong a moral claim as Indians who had been
subjects of the British Raj itself to share in the self-government which
the former British rulers of India had conceded to the Indian people;
and the change seemed unlikely to cause any serious regrets or to pro¬
voke any dangerous reactions, since there were few principalities, if any,
in which a majority of the inhabitants might have been expected to opt

» See IV. iv. 99.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 203
for a continuance of the ancieti regime. On the other hand the Hindu
leaders had been less successful in dealing with their Indian Muslim
counterparts, since it had been beyond their power to coerce them, and
had proved beyond their ability to persuade them, into renouncing their
demand that a separate Muslim successor-state of the British Indian
Empire should be constituted out of territories in which the Muslims
were in a majority over the Hindus.

The Indian Muslims’ motive in insisting upon the creation of Pakistan
was a fear arising from a consciousness of weakness. They had not for¬
gotten how, in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era, the Mughal
Raj had failed to maintain by the sword a dominion over India which
the sword alone had won, and they were aware that, by the same arbitra¬
ment, the greater part of the Mughals’ former domain would have be¬
come the prize of Maratha and Sikh Hindu successor-states if British
military intervention had not given the course of Indian political history
a dramatically different turn by re-establishing an oecumenical govern¬
ment of India under British auspices. The Indian Muslims realized
that, but for this, they would not only have lost their former dominion
over the Hindus but would have paid for their harshness in the exercise
of it by suffering a reversal of roles in which it would have been their
turn to taste the tribulations of ‘under dog’. They also knew that,
although they had been fortunate enough to escape from a perilous pass
with no worse a fate than to find themselves placed on a political parity
with the Hindus under the rule of a third party, they had again allowed
themselves to be outstripped by the Hindus in a phase of the perennial
conflict between these two Indian communities in which a British arbiter
had decreed that the pen should be substituted for the sword as the
weapon to be employed in a trial of strength in which the destinies of the
two parties were as seriously at stake as if this new-fangled academic
competition had not replaced the old-fashioned ordeal by battle.

On the morrow of the British occupation of Bengal in a.d. 1757-60 the
Bengali Hindus who had thereby come under British rule had promptly
divined that a mastery of Modern Western arts w’ould be the key to
success in a w-orld that was passing under Western control and was being
remoulded to a Western pattern; and, by the date of the transfer of
power in India in a.d. 1947, the Panjabi Hindus likewise had been
profiting for all but a hundred years from the opportunities for Western¬
ization that had been afforded to them by the British conquest of their
country in the fifth decade of the nineteenth century. By comparison,
the Indian Muslims—handicapped by an intellectual inertia that was
the legacy of a former military and political ascendancy, and demoralized,
instead of being stimulated, by the shock of their military and political
debacle—had been slow in taking their cue in a race in which the victory
would fall to the most successful Indian adepts in the alien technique
of Modern Western life; and, though in the course of the nineteenth
century the Indian Muslims did wake up and start to run, they were
too late to have been able to make up for lost time by the date in the
twentieth century when they were confronted with the prospect of
having to compete with the Hindus once again, as in the eighteenth

204 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
century, without there being an all-powerful British arbiter to hold the
ring and to guarantee the weaker party against the appalling risk of being
made to pay the uttermost penalty for incompetence.

For these reasons the Indian Muslims insisted in a.d. 1947 on having
a separate successor-state of their own, and the consequent partition of
the former British Indian Empire between the two new Dominions of
India and Pakistan threatened to reproduce, on a sub-continental scale,
the tragic consequences that had followed from the partition of the
Ottoman Empire during the century beginning with the Greek uprising
in a.d. 1821. In a twentieth-century British India, as in a nineteenth-
century Ottoman Orthodox Christendom, the attempt to sort out geo¬
graphically intermingled millets into territorially separate and severally
self-contained national states led to the drawing of frontiers that were
execrable from the administrative and economic points of view; even at
this price, huge minorities were left on the wrong sides of the new
dividing lines; there was a panic flight of millions of refugees who
abandoned their homes and property, were harried by embittered adver¬
saries in the course of a terrible trek, and arrived destitute in the un¬
familiar country in which they had to start life again among unknown
co-religionists; and there was one section of the border between India
and Pakistan where even this calamity was eclipsed by the still greater
evil of an undeclared war for the possession of the autonomous princi¬
pality of Kashmir, whose Muslim population was under the rule of a
Hindu dynasty. By the year a.d. 1952, however, effective efforts had
been made by Indian statesmen, both at Delhi and at Karachi, to save
India from following this dreadful Ottoman course to the bitter end.
The still un-uprooted minorities on both sides of the line had been
sufficiently reassured to bring the flow of refugees to a halt; the dispute
over Kashmir had been referred to the United Nations Organization
for settlement by conciliation; and, while this task had proved to be a
depressingly baffling one, it was, on the other hand, encouraging to
observe that the political malady of Nationalism, which had split India
into two, did not here show any signs of carrying its disintegrating
effect farther, as it had carried it in the Ottoman Empire, by impelling
the divers nationalities embraced within each of the two principal millets
to demand separate territorial sovereignties in their turn.

In the Ottoman Empire, as we have seen, the several nationalities
comprised in the Orthodox Christian Millet-i-Rum had broken away
simultaneously from their Muslim masters and from one another, and
the Muslims themselves had eventually followed this unfortunate
example by developing separate Turkish, Arab, Albanian, and Kurdish
national consciousnesses. In a twentieth-century India the potentialities
of disruption were at least as great within the bosom of the Hindu and
the Muslim community alike. The Bengali Muslim differed from the
Panjabi Muslim as greatly as the Bengali Hindu differed from the
Panjabi Hindu or Sikh; and in the Hindu World there were linguistic
barriers far sharper than those dividing the Northern Indian speakers of
divers dialects of the same Aryan language. The Dravidian languages of
the South were members of an entirely different family. Yet, notwith-

THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 205
standing the existence of these latent incentives to disruption, a politi¬
cally emancipated Hindu community was not showing violent fissiparous
tendencies on lines of nationality any more than on lines of caste. Thus,
at the time of writing, Indian prospects were, on the whole, encouraging
from a short-term political point of view; and, if the impact of the
Modern West did still threaten the Hindu World with serious perils,
these were to be looked for not so much on the political surface of life as
in its economic subsoil and its spiritual depths, and were perhaps likely
there to take some time in coming to a head.

The Gulf between a Hindu and a Post-Christian Western Weltanschauung

The obvious special perils of Westernization which the Hindu World
had to apprehend were two. In the first place the Hindu and the Western
Civilization had hardly any common cultural background and were
strikingly alien from one another in £thos in this age. In the second place
the Hindus who had mastered the intellectual content of an exotic
Modern Western culture with a virtuosity that rivalled the performance
of the Phanariots were a tiny minority perched on the backs of a vast
majority of ignorant and destitute peasants as precariously as, in the
constitution of the Human Psyche, the Consciousness hovers over the
abyss of the Subconscious. By the date of India’s attainment of political
independence as a state member of a comity of Western and Westerniz¬
ing nations, the radiation of the Western culture into the Hindu World
had affected only the top layer of the society. Yet there was no ground
for expecting to see the process of Western cultural penetration come to
a stop at that level, while there were strong grounds for forecasting that,
when it began to leaven the peasant mass beneath, it would also begin
there to produce novel and revolutionary effects.

The cultural gulf between the Hindu Society and the Modern Western
Society at the time when the top layer of the Hindu Society had begun
to be appreciably affected by Western influence had been wider than
that between the Russian Orthodox Christian, Ottoman Orthodox
Christian, Ottoman Muslim, and Modern Western societies whose
encounters with one another we have surveyed in previous sections of
this chapter.

Differentiated though these four societies had been by the diversity
of their individual experiences and achievements, they had retained
nevertheless an affinity with one another in virtue of a common cultural
heritage derived from a single pair of antecedent civilizations, the
Hellenic and the Syriac. 1 By contrast, the Hindu Society was not re¬
lated either to the Western or to the Iranic Muslim Society by any
comparable degree of kinship; for, though a tincture of both the Hellenic
and the Syriac culture could be traced in the veins of the Hindu body
social too, the dilution was in both cases weak. 2 Moreover, the difference

* Sec pp. 90-91, below.

* The western fringe of the domain of the Hindu Civilirat ion’s predecessor the Indie
Society had been annexed by Cyrus II and by Darius I to an Achaemenian Empire which
had served as the Syriac Society’s universal state (see VI. vii. 63, 634, and 649),
and the transmission of some measure of Syriac cultural influence from the Indie
Society to the Hindu was attested by the Syriac provenance of the Khardshthi Alphabet

206 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
in £thos between the Hindu Weltanschauung and the Western Weltan¬
schauung in the Late Modern version in which this first began to make
an impression on Hindu souls was no mere diversity; it was an outright
antithesis; for by the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
of the Christian Era the Modern West, as we have seen, 1 had fabricated
a secular version of its cultural heritage from which Religion was
eliminated in order to give primacy to Technology, whereas the Hindu
Society, like its Indie predecessor, was and remained religious to the
core—so much so, indeed, as to be open to the charge of ‘religiosity’ if,
as that pejorative word implies, there can in truth be such a thing as an
excessive concentration of psychic energy on a spiritual activity which is
Man’s most important pursuit. 1

This antithesis between a passionately religious and a deliberately
secular outlook on life cut deeper than any diversity of vein between one
religion and another; and in this point the Hindu, the Islamic, and the
Early Modern Western Christian cultures were more in sympathy with
one another than any one of them was with the secular culture of the
West in its late modern phase. Though the religion of the Hindu World
was of Indie provenance, while the religions of the Islamic and Early
Modern Western Christian worlds were derived from Judaism, this
diversity of historical origins was of less moment than the consensus of
all three societies in taking it for granted that Religion—whatever the
orthodox presentation of it might be held to be—was the mainspring
and meaning of Man’s existence. On the strength of this common belief,
it had been possible for Hindus to become converts to Islam and to
Roman Catholic Christianity without subjecting themselves to an in¬
tolerable spiritual tension. The Muslims of Eastern Bengal and the
Roman Catholics of Goa were living evidence of this; for both these
communities were descended from Hindu converts with only a slight
admixture of Central Asian blood in the one case and West European
blood in the other.

This proven ability of Hindus to make their way on to alien cultural
ground by a religious approach was significant, because, if religiosity
was the Hindu Civilization’s chief distinguishing mark, its next most
conspicuous feature was aloofness. This characteristic aloofness was, no
doubt, overcome in the intellectual compartment of their spiritual life
by those Hindus who, from the latter part of the eighteenth century of
the Christian Era onwards, acquired a secular Modern Western educa¬
tion and thereby qualified for playing a part in the reconstruction of the
political and economic sides of Indian life on a Modem Western basis;

(see V. V. too). The Hellenic culture had bitten deeper into Indie life; it shared the
credit for the genesis of the Mshiyina, as was attested by the Hellenic element in the
style of Mahayanian Buddhist art (sec 111 . iii. 131 and 247, n. 2; V. v. 134, 196, and
4S1). This Hellenistic art, however, had become an heirloom, not of the Hindu World,
but of the Far East, for the Indie Society had succeeded in expelling this intrusive
Hellenic element from its own body social before going into dissolution, and the
religion of Hinduism, which had been the symbol and the agent of this anti-Hellenic
reaction in Indie souls, had also served as the chrysalis for incubating the Indie Society's
Hindu successor.

1 On p. 118, with n. 9, above.

* This vein of religiosity in the Indie and Hindu civilization has been noticed in
III. iii. 384-5.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 207
but the recruits of this unhappy intelligentsia performed a valuable
social service as cultural intermediaries between the Hindu and the
Modern Western World at the cost of a schism in their souls which did
not afflict cither the Bengali Muslim or the Goanese Roman Catholic
descendants of apostates from the Hindu, but not from the religious,
outlook on life. This Hindu intelligentsia bred by the British Raj re¬
mained aloof in their hearts from the secular Modern Western way of
life with which their minds had become familiar; and this discord pro¬
duced a deep-seated spiritual malaise in Hindu souls 1 which could not
be cured by the political panacea of obtaining full self-government for an
Indian national state organized on a contemporary Western pattern.
Indeed, the relaxation of a political tension might actually bring the
spiritual tension to a head by leaving a Westernizing Hindu intellect
tite-d-tite with an unconscionably religious Hindu soul, without any
further possibility of avoiding a painful searching of heart through find¬
ing a scapegoat in an English interloper whose alien regime might
plausibly be held responsible for all Indian ills, psychological as well as
political.

The Aloofness of a Reformed British Civil Service in India

The unyielding spiritual aloofness of Western-educated Hindu minds
would in any case have been a formidable problem both for the human
beings whose Hindu souls were being racked by an unresolved discord
and for the Hindu Society in which these inharmonious ‘intellectuals’
were called upon to take the lead in an age of Hindu history in which a
collision between the Hindu and the secular Modern Western culture
was the dominant event in social as well as personal life. The situation
had been aggravated, however, by the mischance that this unmitigated
spiritual aloofness on the Hindu side had been matched by an accentuated
spiritual aloofness in the souls of the Western rulers with whom the
Hindu intelligentsia had to do business under the regime of the British
R 3 j. Between the year a.d. 1786, in which Cornwallis assumed the

« The spiritual malaise which is the occupational disease of an intelligentsia has been
noticed in V. v. 154-9, and is examined further on pp. 338-43, below. The sharpness of
the psychological tension in twentieth-century Hindu souls that had been Westernized
intellectually while remaining Hindu in feeling, intuition, and sensation (to use C. G.
Jung’s categories) may be gauged from the testimony of nineteenth-century Russian
souls in which the gulf between a traditional way of life and an exotic Western Weltan¬
schauung was much less wide, and the tension therefore proportionately less severe.
Unhappy though they were in almost everything else, the nineteenth-century Russian
intelligentsia were fortunate in being gifted with a power of artistic expression and in
being moved to use this gift as a vent for relieving their spiritual malaise by discharging
their feelings in works of literature. This literary secretion from a culturally sick body
social was a pearl of great price for the historian as well as for the psychologist and the
man of letters. Out of the vast wealth of evidence which it offered to the student of
encounters between contemporaries of diverse culture, we may file here one passage
culled from the memoirs of Alexander Herzen (vivebat a.d. 1812-70), the natural son
of a Russian nobleman by a girl from Stuttgart:

'In Russia men exposed to the influence of this mighty Western movement became
original, but not historical, figures. Foreigners at home, foreigners in other lands, idle
spectators, spoilt for Russia by Western prejudices and for the West by Russian habits,
they were a sort of intellectual superfluity and were lost in artificial life, in sensual
pleasure, and in unbearable egoism' (Herzen, Alexander: My Past and Thoughts,
translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett (London 1924, Chat to and Windus,
6 vols.), vol. i, p. 94 ).

208 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
governor-generalship of British India with a mandate to reform the
administration, 1 and the year a.d. 1858, which saw the completion of
the transfer of British political authority in India from the East India
Company to the Crown, there was a profound, and on the whole un¬
toward, change in the attitude of the European-born British ruling class
in India towards their Indian-born fellow subjects.

In the eighteenth century the English in India, like their predecessors
the Mughals and the Portuguese, had followed unselfconsciously the
custom of the country, not excluding the custom of abusing power, but
they had also likewise been on familiar terms of personal intercourse
with the Indians whom they unscrupulously cheated and oppressed. In
the course of the nineteenth century they achieved a notable moral rally.
The intoxication with suddenly acquired power and the demoraliza¬
tion by suddenly opened facilities for illicit personal enrichment which
had disgraced the first generation of English rulers in Bengal were
successfully overcome by a new ideal of moral integrity, which required
the English civil servant in India to look upon his power as a public
responsibility and not as a personal opportunity. The stages in this
moral redemption of the British Raj in India by British consciences can
be followed from the India Act of a.d. 1784 to the introduction, in a.d.
1855,* a competitive examination as the gate of entry into the Indian
Civil Service ; 3 but pari passu we can also follow the waning of personal
familiarity between English residents in India and their Indian neigh¬
bours, until the all too humanly Indianized English 'nabob’ has changed,
out of recognition, into the professionally irreproachable and personally
unapproachable English civil servant who said goodbye in a.d. 1947 to
an India to whom he had dedicated his working life without making her
his home.

In the eighteenth century, after the decay of the Mughal Raj had gone
far enough to break down the containing walls of the factories in which
Western merchants had hitherto been living in isolation 4 like their
counterparts in the Sloboda at Moscow before the days of Peter the
Great, 5 the English who went to India in divers capacities—in the ser¬
vice of the East India Company, in the service of Indian princes, or as
free-lance military and political adventurers hoping to carve out suc¬
cessor-states of the Mughal Empire on their own account 6 —were all of

1 A second date which was fateful for the future course of relations between Indians
and English was the year a.d. 1709, which saw Wellesley initiate a systematic conquest
of India by British arms. While the British occupation of Bengal in a.d. 1757-60 might
perhaps not inaccurately be described as an act of empire-building by inadvertence, this
description certainly would not apply to the British conquest of the rest of the sub¬
continent during the fifty years a.d. 1799-1849. This military programme was de¬
liberately taken in hand in a.d. 1799 with an eye to forestalling a re-entry of the French
into India, and it was deliberately carried forward after A.D. 18:4 in order to round off
a British Raj with which the French were thereafter no longer in a position to interfere.

2 See Blunt, Sir E.: The Indian Civil Service (London 1937, Faber), p. 46.

> The British Indian Civil Service has been noticed in this Study, in other contexts,
in V. v. 47~48 and VI. vii. 364-5.

4 See Spear, T. G. P.: The Nabobs: A Study 0/ the Social Life of the English in Eigh¬
teenth-Century India (London 1932, Milford), p. 22. * See p. 130, above.

6 See Compton, H. E.: A Particular Account of the European Military Adventurers of
Hindustan, 1784-2803 (London 1892 (1st cd.) and 1896 (2nd cd.), Fisher Unwin);
Grey, C., and Garrett, H. L. O.: European Adventurers in Northern India, 1785-1849
(Lahore 1929, Punjab Government Press).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 209
one mind in looking forward to making themselves at home in the
country, as other foreign conquerors of India had done before them. In
this Indianizing movement the free-lance adventurers went the fastest
and the farthest. 1 For example, Claude Martin (vivebat a.d. 1735-1800),
a French soldier of fortune who, after the fall of Pondicherry in a.d.
1761, had taken military service first with the British and then with the
Nawab of Oudh, 2 ‘was nearly as Indianizcd as the Nawab was Euro¬
peanized'. 3 At Lucknow, Martin had four concubines and a household of
eunuchs and slaves; but he combined this Mughal pomp and luxury
with a cosmopolitan culture, for he also had 4,000 Western books
(Latin, French, Italian, and English), a collection of Persian and Sanskrit
manuscripts, and a hundred oil paintings, including works by Zoffany
and the two Daniells. 4 Among the English servants of the British East
India Company in Martin’s generation the ideal of emulating in India
the career of the London city merchant who became an English country
squire was replaced, after the Company’s victory over a Mughal naw 5 b
at the Battle of Plassey ( commissum a.d. 1757), by the ideal of becoming
a ‘nabob’. 5

Instead of continuing to marry Goan Portuguese Christian wives, the
Company’s English servants now took, like Martin, to keeping zenanas
alia MorescaS Till circa a.d. 1800 there was no prejudice, in this Anglo-
Indian society, against ‘natural children’, and these would be sent to
England for their education if not too dark ‘to escape detection’. 7 The
Indian mothers of these well-beloved children were sometimes married
in lawful wedlock by the children’s English fathers. The English servants
of the East India Company who went the fastest and the farthest in this
direction were the collectors—a new class of civil servants, stationed not
in Calcutta but throughout the country-side, which had been called into
existence in a.d. 1772 8 as a consequence of the Company’s acquisition,
in a.d. 1765, of the financial administration of Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, and
the Northern Circars. 9 These widely scattered English representatives
of the Company came under the social influence of the Bengali nawabs
and zamindSrs among whom they were living, and they transmitted this
current of Indian cultural radiation to other English people in India. 10
The English in India took to learning Persian;" and, through this
sympathetic medium of intercourse, they made Indian friends. They
found Muslim princes more congenial than MarSthSs; 12 but, besides the
Muslim country gentry, their friends included cultivated Indian official
colleagues of theirs, some of whom were Hindus, 13 and Hastings’ 14 own
personal circle of Indian friends was knit by such genuine ties of feeling
that, twenty years after he had left India, the survivors continued to
make affectionate inquiries after him. 15

This easy and intimate cosmopolitan eighteenth-century Anglo-

' See Spear, op. cit., p. >33. * See ibid., pp. 83-85.

1 Ibid., p. 133- 4 Sec ibid., p. 85. » See ibid.,pp. 32 and 37.

6 Sec ibid., pp. 36-37. 7 Ibid., p. 63. * See ibid., p. 31.

« See VI. vii. 365. 10 See Spear, op. cit., pp. 3 >~ 3 *-

«« See ibid., p. 136. »» Sec ibid., p. 135. «» See ibid., p. 136.

'• Governor of Bengal, A.D. 177a; Governor-General of Britilh India, A.D. 1774-85.
15 Sec ibid., pp. 135-6.

2io ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Indian life startled a twentieth-century English student of History by its
manifest freedom from subsequently erected barriers to social inter¬
course between English people and Indians when scenes from it were
brought before his eye in contemporary pictures by John Zoffany
(vivebat a.d. 1735-1810) and other English artists of the day. 1 This
historical spectacle was startling because the genial ‘cosmopolitanism’
to which it bore witness had been swiftly superseded and permanently
replaced by a bleaker social climate. This counter-movement, which
first declared itself in symptoms that might have been discounted as
trivial, eventually spread to the vital sphere of personal relations. The
substitution of Western for Oriental military music in the Company’s
forces at Madras in a.d. 1767 2 was followed, after Hastings’ recall in
a.d. X785, by the banning of Oriental music in the social life of the
English community in India. 1 Arrack went the same way; 4 and the habit
of nargllah-smoking, which had replaced pipe-smoking circa a.d. 1754-5,
declined after a.d. 1773.* By a.d. 1827 it had come to be regarded as
extremely bad taste for an English lady in India to wear Indian orna¬
ments, 6 and, before the turn of the century, the contemporary Western
styles of Hellenistic ‘classical’ architecture and gardening were already
being applied in British India tels quels . 7 The exclusion of half-castes
from the British Indian public service in a.d. 1792 s by Cornwallis
(fungebatur a.d. 1786-93) was a graver portent which foreshadowed
Wellesley’s deliberate creation of a social distance between English and
Indians. "WcUesleyffungebatur a.d. 1798-1805) adopted a hectoring tone
in his dealings with Indians, and he stopped the practice of inviting
Indians and half-castes to official parties. 9

‘Race prejudice at the beginning of the [eighteenth] century was instinc¬
tive, and disappeared with time and better acquaintance; at the end it was
doctrinal, and precluded the acquaintance w’hich might have removed it.’ 10

1 Sec, for example, Zoffany’* picture (in which Claude Martin figures) of Colonel
Mordaunt’s cock match at Lucknow, a.d. 1786, painted for Warren Hastings, and his
portrait group of the Palmer family, probably also painted at the same place in the same
year. ‘Major William Palmer is looking at his wife, the Bibi FS’iz Bakhsh, who is seated
on his right with her three children. The Bibi’s sister is on Palmer's left, and three
women attendants complete the group’ (Catalogue of Exhibition of Art, chiefly from the
Dominions of India and Pakistan (London 1947-8, Royal Academy of Arts)). These two
pictures bear witness to the familiarity of the relations between the latc-cightecnth-
ccntury English in India and their Indian contemporaries in private life: and this un¬
selfconscious practice of doing in India as India does was followed by them in affairs
of state ns well. Zoffany’s picture of a durbar (Plate No. 4. in the Journal of the Royal
Society of Arts, vol. xcviii, No. 4820, of the 5th May. 1950, illustrating Sir W. Foster’s

B per on 'British Artists in India’ on pp. 518-25 of the same issue) portrays Warren
istincs and his English staff seated cross-legged on the ground, transacting business
with a Mughal potentate bolstered on a carpet. While the other Englishmen betray some
signs of physical discomfort, Hastings is manifestly at his ease.

* Sec Spear, op. cit., p. 30. J See ibid., p. 33. * See ibid., p. 34.

J See ibid., pp. 36 and 98. On the other hand the cult of cleanliness, which the
eighteenth-century Englishman in India had acquired from his Indian contemporaries,
was transmitted by him to his twentieth-century compatriots in Great Britain (see ibid.,

6 t>ee ibid., p. 142* 1 Sec ibid., pp. 34 and 5 ©-sr.

8 See ibid., p. 63. « See ibid., p. 138.

»o Spear, op. cit., p. 144. The spirit of the pre-Wellesley phase of Anglo-Indian rela¬
tions died hardest at Bombay, where the commercial interests and activities of the
English community continued to overshadow the field of government and administration
(see ibid., pp. 134-5)- At Bombay (and likewise at Surat) the course of events was evolu-

THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 211

Why was it that the former free-and-easy personal relations died away
so unluckily in an age when the loss of their beneficent influence on
Anglo-Indian relations could least well be afforded? No doubt the
change was due to the combined operation of a number of different
causes.

In the first place the latter-day English official in the Indian Civil
Service might fairly plead that his unfortunate aloofness from the
Indians whom he governed was the inevitable price of his precious moral
integrity in the discharge of a public trusteeship. How could a man be
expected to act professionally like a god without also retaining the airs of
a god in private life ? Another, and less estimable, cause of the change of
attitude was perhaps the pride inspired by conquest; for by a.d. 1849,
and indeed by a.d. 1803, the military and political power of the
English in India had become sensationally stronger than it had been in
a.d. 1786, not to speak of a.d. 1757.' The operation of these two causes
had been analysed acutely by a twentieth-century English student of
the history of Indo-British social and cultural relations.

‘As the [eighteenth] century drew to its close, a change in the social
atmosphere gradually came about. The frequency of... “reciprocal enter¬
tainments” decreased, the formation of intimate friendships with Indians
ceased-The higher posts of the Government were filled with appoint¬

ments from England; its designs became more imperial and its attitude
more haughty and aloof. The gulf which Mussulman nawabs and English
tons viveurs, diplomatic pandits and English scholars had for a time
bridged over began ominously to widen again. ... A “superiority com¬
plex” was forming which regarded India not only as a country whose
institutions were bad and* people corrupted, but one which was by its
nature incapable of ever becoming any better . . .

‘It is one of the ironies of Indo-European relations in India that the
purging of the administration coincided with the widening of the racial
gulf 2 . . . . The days of corrupt Company officials, of illgotten fortunes, of
oppression of ryots, of zenanas and of illicit sexual connexions, were also
the days when Englishmen were interested in Indian culture, wrote
Persian verses, and foregathered with pandits and maulvis and nawabs

tionary, not revolutionary (*« ibid., p. 75). English and Indian business men went on
meeting on equal term*, and, between the English and the Parsecs, social relations were
intimate (sec ibid., pp. 72,74-75, and 127). No doubt Bombay benefited from the stimu¬
lus of being India’s maritime march in an Oceanic age of history (see II. ii. 133). AH the
same, on the 25th September, 1929, the writer of this Study wag reproved at Bombay by
his English hosts there for having made the faux pas of taking an omnibus. It was ex¬
plained to him that, in Bombay, it was beneath an Englishman’s dignity to ride in a
public conveyance. He ought to have ridden solitary in a cab.

« Spear points out (in op. cit., pn. 32-33 and «J°) 'bat ‘the period of cosmopolitan
intercourse’ between English and Indians in India, which can be couated approxi¬
mately with the term of Warren Hastings' governor-generalship (fungebatur A.D. 1774-

S was also the period in which there was a balance of political power between the
ish East India Company and the Indian successor-states of the Mughal RSj. Welles¬
ley ( fungtbatur a.d. 1798-1805), during whose governor-generalship first Tippu Sahib
and then the Marathis were overthrown, and who introduced a viceregal splendour
into the governor-general’s mise-rn-scine (see Spear, op. cit., p. 65), was alto the moving
spirit in the deliberate adoption of a pointed attitude of haughty aloofness towards the
English conquerors’ Indian subjects on the part of an alien English dominant minority.

* The earliest recorded complaints of British race-feeling in India come from James
Skinner (vivebar a.d. 1778-1841), a military adventurer with Indian blood in his veins
who went over from the Marathi to the British service on the eve of the British assault
on the Mara this in A.D. 1803 (Spear, op. cit., p. 13).

2i2 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

on terms of social equality and personal friendship. The tragedy of
Cornwallis ... was that in uprooting the acknowledged evils of corruption
he upset the social balance without which mutual understanding was
impossible. . . . Cornwallis . . . made a new governing class by his ex¬
clusion of all Indians from the higher governmental posts. Corruption
was stamped out at the cost of equality and cooperation. In his own mind,
as in the commonly accepted view, there was a necessary connexion be¬
tween the two measures; "Every native of Hindustan”, he said, “I verily
believe, is corrupt”. . . . He thought English corruption could be solved
by reasonable salaries, and did not stop to consider that the advantage of
Indian goodwill made it at least worth trying as a remedy for Indian
corruption also. He never thought of creating an Indian imperial bureau¬
cracy on the model of Akbar’s mansabdars, which by special training,
proper salaries and the encouragement of equal treatment, promotion and
honours, might have been bound to the Company as the Moghul officials
were bound to the Emperor.’ 1 *

A third cause of estrangement was the speeding-up of communica¬
tions between India and England as a consequence of certain early
nineteenth-century achievements of Modern Western technology. The
reopening and the subsequent improvement of the short route between
Western Europe and India via Egypt—first by portage on camel-back
between Alexandria and Suez from sailing-ship to sailing-ship, then by
steam instead of sail and by railway instead of camel caravan, and
finally by the opening of the Suez Canal in a.d. 1869*—made it feasible
for English people to travel to and fro between England and India so
quickly and frequently that an English civil servant or business man
posted in India could now bring out an English wife to join him, 3 and
could go on to bring up his children in England without completely
breaking up his family life, especially after the linking up of India with
England by telegraph in a.d. 1865. Thanks to the doubtful blessing of
these technological miracles, the latter-day English employee in India
contrived to do his work there as a pilgrim and a sojourner who remained
psychologically domiciled in a home on English ground. 4

The three so far enumerated causes of latter-day English aloofness
from the Indians among whom the English in India worked were all of
the Englishman’s making; but there was perhaps a fourth cause, and one
more potent than the rest, of which the Englishman in India was the
victim and not the originator. An Indian who had experienced and

1 Spear, T. G. P.: The Nabobs: A Study of the Soeial Life of the English in Eighteenth-
Century India (London 1932, Milford), pp. 136, 137, 145, and 137.

* See Hoskins, H. L.: British Routes to India (London 1928, Longmans Green),
P- 383-

3 According to Spear, op. cit., pp. 140-2, the social self-insulation of the English
in India was promoted by the increase in the number of English women in India—and
also by the increase in the number of evangelical Protestant English missionaries,
whose attitude towards 'the heathen’ was bigoted.

♦ While the technological revolution in means of communication was the new factor
that made this attitude of aloofness come to prevail among Englishmen serving in India
in all capacities, the psychological change had been initiated, while the sailing ship was
still in its heyday, by the soldiers of the Royal British Army as soon as units of this force
had begun to be posted in India. The Royal troops 'inaugurated the conception of
service in India as a temporary vocation undertaken with a view to retirement in Eng¬
land' (Spear, op. cit., p. 31), whereas the officers of the newly raised Company troops
‘in civil life conformed to their Anglo-Indian environments’ (ibid., p. 30).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 213
resented the latter-day English resident’s aloofness might feel more
charitably towards this originally self-invited (and eventually also self-
dismissed) intruder if he were to recollect that, for perhaps as long as
three thousand years before the advent of the English in India, the
sub-continent had been saddled with the institution of Caste; that the
Hindu Society had accentuated a trait which it had inherited from its
Indie predecessor; and that after the departure of the English, as before
their arrival, the people of India were still afflicting themselves with a
social evil of their own making. Looked at in the long perspective of
Indian history, the aloofness which the English in India developed
during the hundred and fifty years of their raj could be diagnosed as
being a mild attack of the chronic Indian psychological malady of castc-
mindedness. It was perhaps not altogether surprising or altogether in¬
excusable that, in the course of their sojourn in India, the English
should have been affected in their turn by an age-old sub-continental
atmosphere. 1

The Unsolved Problem of a Rising Pressure of Population

While the aggravating effect of a latter-day English aloofness on the
spiritual discord in intellectually Westernized Hindu souls might be

« This fourth possible explanation of the aloofness to which the English in India
gradually succumbed might account for the striking difference, in their attitude towards
'natives’i between the latter-day English in India and their Dutch contemporaries in
Indonesia. In Insular India the personal relations between the Dutch and the Javanese
were still, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much what the relations between
the English and the Hindus in Continental India had been in the eighteenth century.
Down to the moment of the liquidation of the Dutch Empire in Indonesia by the
Japanese conquest in a.d. 1942, the Dutch were still bringing up in Java children of
undiluted Dutch blood, and at the same time intermarrying with the Javanese and
reckoning the issue of mixed marriages as Europeans. Why, in Java, did no refrigeration
of the psychological atmosphere occur, considering that the first three of the four
possible causes of the change in British India were all operative in Netherlands India
likewise? Might not the answer be that in Indonesia the fourth of the causes that we
have enumerated was not at work, and that this difference in the situation made all the
difference to the course of events? A difference in the cultural environment had not
always existed, for, from the fifth to the fifteenth century of the Christian Era, Indonesia
had been an overseas colonial extension of the Hindu World; but, between the decline
and fall of the Hindu Indonesian Empire of Majnpahit during the hundred years ending
in a.d. 1318 and the arrival of the Dutch in a.d. 159s, Indonesia was captured from the
Hindu Society by the Arabic Muslim Society, and In a.d. 1952 the only living monu¬
ment of the Hindu Age in the Archipelago was the persisting Hinduism of the inhabi¬
tants of the little island of Bali. Thus, since before the beginning of the Dutch Rai in
Indonesia, the prevailing religion in the Archipelago had come to be Islam; and, of all
the living higher religions, Islam—standing, as it did, for equality between all loyal
Muslim subjects of a single sovereign Lord God—was the most inimical, in practice as
well as in theory, to the institution of Caste. Perhaps, therefore, it was no accident that
in an Indonesia where Islam held the field the Dutch should have remained immune
from the caste spirit in an age when the English were succumbing to it in a Continental
India where Islam had never succeeded in gaining the allegiance of a majority of the
population and had recently also suffered a political eclipse.

In another context (in II. i. 211-27), wc have observed that, in the matter of race feel¬
ing, Roman Catholic Western Christians had, on the whole, come nearer than Protestant
Western Christians to approaching the Islamic standard, though in most other respects
Protestantism had more affinity with Islam than Roman Catholicism had. An un¬
fortunate inspiration from the Old Testament appears to account for the badness of the
record of the Dutch settlers in South Africa and the English settlers in North America,
by comparison with the French Canadians, in their behaviour towards the 'Canaanites'
whom they found in the land. A common Protestantism, however, cannot explain either
the diversity of Dutch Protestant behaviour in South Africa and in Indonesia or the
diversity of English Protestant behaviour in India in the eighteenth and in the twentieth
century.

2 X 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
relieved by the termination of the British Raj, the ameliorative effect of
British administration on the condition and expectations of the Indian
peasantry was a British legacy which might prove to be a mill-stone
round the necks of the British civil servants’ Hindu successors in the
government of India.

Under a Pax Britannica that had been maintained for more than a
hundred years, the natural resources of the sub-continent had been eked
out in divers ways: by the building of a net-work of railways which made
it possible for surplus food-supplies in one area to be transported to
another area where there was a shortage; by the irrigation of previously
uncultivated areas in the Panjab; and, above all, by an able and con¬
scientious administration. By the time of the departure of their English
rulers in a.d. 1947, the Indian peasantry, uneducated though they still
were in the academic sense, had perhaps become just sufficiently alive to
the material achievements of a scientifically developed Modern Western
technology and the political ideals of a Christian-hearted Modern
Western democracy 1 to begin to question both the justice and the in¬
evitability of their own ancestral indigence. They had begun to feel
dimly that they too had a right to share in those amenities of Civiliza¬
tion which in the past had been the monopoly of a small minority in
India as elsewhere, and at the same time to imagine vaguely that the
magic cornucopia of Science could perform, ‘in real life’, the legendary
miracle of the loaves and fishes, if only a ruling minority chose to use it
for this beneficent purpose.

At the same time an Indian peasantry that was beginning to dream
these dreams had been doing its worst to prevent their realization by
continuing, as in the past, to breed heedlessly up to the limits of sub¬
sistence on a meagre customary standard of living, with the result that
the addition to India’s food supply which had been wrung out of a
previously unutilized margin of resources by British administrative
enterprise had mainly gone, not towards improving the Indian peasant’s
individual lot, but towards increasing the peasantry’s numbers. Under
British rule the population of India had risen from about 206,000,000
in a.d. 1872 to 338,119,154 in a.d. 1931 and 388,997,955 in a.d. 1941;
at the time of the transfer of power from English to Indian hands, this
human flood was still rising; and by the same date the possibilities of
increasing India’s capacity to contain a mounting volume of inhabitants
had been to a large extent used up. How were the Hindu successors of the
British to handle a political legacy which already allowed no margin at
all for incompetence or folly in the administration of the stewardship
which they had now taken over ?

The traditional cure for ‘over-population’, not only in the Hindu
World but in the economy of other civilizations too in a pre-democratic
age, was to allow famine, pestilence, civil disorder, and war to reduce the
population again to a figure at which the survivors would once more find
themselves able to lead their traditional life on their customary low
standard; and horrifying instances of drastic reductions of population

1 Sec Bergson, H.: La Deux Sources de la Morale el de La Religion (Paris 1932,
Alcan), pp. 304-5, quoted in this Study in I. i. 9 and IV. iv. 156.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 2x5

by methods of barbarism were indeed on record. For example, the
population of ‘Iraq, after having been built up by perhaps more than
three thousand years of careful husbandry, had been cut down again by
the last two Romano-Persian wars and thereafter by the Mongol in¬
vasion; 1 North-West Africa, whose scientific cultivation the Carthagin¬
ians had begun, the Romans had completed, and the Primitive Muslim
Arabs had spared, had eventually been devastated by the barbarian Arab
Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym; 1 and the population of China had been
reduced, if the official census figures were to be believed, from 9,069,154
to 2,900,000 families within the short term of ten years ( a . d . 754-64) by
the destructive effects of An Lu Shan’s rebellion against the T'ang
regime. 3 In the latest chapter of Indian history before the transfer of
power, Mahatma Gandhi, in his single-minded quest of independence
for an India struggling to be free, had willed for her the same Malthusian
end, without willing the necessary barbaric means.

Gandhi had divined that the achievement of mere political liberation
from British rule might be an illusory emancipation if India still re¬
mained entangled in the economic tendrils of a Westernized World; and
he unerringly laid his axe to this economic banyan tree’s technological
root in launching his campaign for the abandonment of the use of
machine-made cotton goods by the people of India in favour of home-
spun; but his countrymen’s unwillingness to follow his lead on this
crucial point was a sign of the times, 4 for it brought into prominence the
fact that by this date India was implicated economically in the life of
the Western World no longer merely as a purchaser from abroad of the
products of a Western mechanized industry, but now also by the far
more compromising bond of having learnt to manufacture such products
for herself with Indian hands that had mastered a Western technique.
Moreover, even if Gandhi had succeeded in putting out of business the
Hindu textile manufacturers of Ahmadabad and Bombay, the effect
would have been to precipitate in India an economic, social, and political
crisis which could never have been left for Nature to solve in her own
brutal way by cither a British civil service or by its Western-educated
Hindu successors.

If and when this still undischarged but also still unexorcized storm-
cloud on a politically free India’s horizon did burst in a tornado-blast,
the Hindu statesmen responsible for the government of India in that
day would be constrained by the moral atmosphere of a Westernizing
World to strive for some relatively humane and constructive solution.
They would find themselves confronted with an Indian peasantry that
had caught just enough of the Modern Western spirit to be unwilling
this time to acquiesce tamely in a peasantry’s traditional tribulations;
they would have to reckon with an oecumenical public conscience 5

X Sec IV. iv. 42 - 43 - * Sec III. iii. 322-4, 445 - 6 , and 473 ~ 4 . “*»d V. v. 247.

* See Fitzgerald, C. P.: China, A Short Cultural History (London 1935, Cresset
Press), p. 308. 4 Sec III. iii. 190-1. and 202-4.

s This conscience had proclaimed a conviction of responsibility for being the keeper
of the vast peasant majority of Mankind when, at the dose of the general war of a.d.
1939-45, the authorities of the victorious United Nations had taken account of the whole
population of the World, including the rice-eating as well as the wheat-eating peoples,
in administering the distribution of the then available food supplies.

216 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
which no parochial government could any longer afford to ignore; and,
most compelling influence of all, the voice of this conscience would also
be speaking to them from within their own partially Westernized souls.

For these reasons it could be prophesied with some confidence that
the Western-minded statesmen of a Hindu Raj would have to grapple
one day with the problem of a depressed Indian peasantry. It could not,
however, be taken for granted that they would find themselves able to
solve this inexorable problem by Modern Western political methods;
and, should a Western panacea prove to be of no avail in a crisis which,
for India, would be one of life and death, a rival Russian panacea would
inevitably force its way on to India’s national agenda; for a Communist
Russia, like a Westernizing India, had inherited the problem of a de¬
pressed peasantry from her native cultural past, and, unlike India, she
had already responded to this challenge on lines that she had worked out
for herself. These Communist lines might be too ruthless and too revolu¬
tionary for either the Indian peasantry or the Indian intelligentsia to be
able to follow them with any zest; but, as an alternative to the still
grimmer fate of decimation, a Communist solution of the peasantry
problem might demand consideration, faute de mieux, and this might
bring a politically emancipated India face to face with the ideology of a
Soviet Union with whom India—unlike China and the Islamic World
and Eastern Europe—was not, or at any rate not yet, in immediate
geographical contact. 1

4. The Modern West and the Islamic World
The Encirclement of the Islamic World by the West, Russia, and Tibet

At the opening of the modern chapter of Western history, two sister
Islamic societies, standing back to back, blocked all the overland lines of
access from the contemporary domains of the Western and the Russian
Society to other parts of the Old World.

Though the Arabic Muslim Civilization had not inherited the
Atlantic seaboard of the Andalusian Umayyad Caliphate in the Iberian
Peninsula, at the close of the fifteenth century it was still holding an
Atlantic seaboard in Africa extending from the Straits of Gibraltar to
the Senegal. Western Christendom thus still remained insulated from
Tropical Africa overland, while waves of Arab influence were breaking
upon the Dark Continent not only along its north coast in the Sudan out
of the dry sea of the Sahara, but also along its east coast, the S 5 hil, out
of the Indian Ocean. 1 That ocean had indeed become an Arab lake, to

1 The bearing of Russia’s Communist solution of the problem of a depressed peasan-
y on the destinies of alt the non-Russian societies, including India, that were likewise

The possibility that the Soviet Union and India might eventually b’ccomc immediate
neighbours as a consequence of the partition of British India between the Indian Union
ana Pakistan is discussed on pp. 690-1, below.

1 One wave of Arab influence also broke—to the eventual undoing of the Arabs
themselves—upon another then still-dark continent lying not to the south but to the
north of the Arabic Muslim World. The lateen sail (sec Perry, J. H.: Europe and a
Wider World (London 1949, Hutchinson), pp. 22-24) and the art of navigating the high
seas by taking astronomical bearings (see Prestage, E.: The Portuguese Pioneers (London
1938, Black), p. 315) were both conveyed by Arab hands from the Indian Ocean, where

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 217
which the Venetian trading partners of the Egyptian middlemen had no
access, while Arab shipping was not only plying up and down the Indian
Ocean’s African shore from Suez to Sofala, but had also found its way
across to Indonesia, captured the archipelago from Hinduism for Islam,
and pushed on eastwards to plant an outpost in the Western Pacific by
converting the pagan Malay inhabitants of the southernmost of the
Philippines—whom the Spanish ocean-going mariners duly recognized
as ‘Moors' when they came upon them in the sixteenth century in a cir¬
cumnavigation of the globe from east to west.

At the close of the fifteenth century the Iranic Muslim Civilization
held what seemed to be an even stronger strategic position vis-a-vis both
Western Christendom and Russia. The ‘Osmanli empire-builders’ pro¬
gramme of bringing the whole of the main body of Orthodox Christen¬
dom under Iranic Muslim rule had been duly completed by Sultan
Mehmed II Fatih (imperabat a . d . 1451-81) through the conquest of
Constantinople, the Morea, Q 3 ram 3 n, and Trcbizond. The same reign
had seen the Black Sea turned into an Ottoman Lake in a . d . 1475
through the seizure of the Genoese colonies Caffa and Tana in the
Crimea 1 and the establishment of Ottoman suzerainty over a Crimean
Tatar successor-state of Chingis Khan’s son Juji’s Mongol horde,
whose sedentary subjects in the peninsula and nomad subjects in the
Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe were the ‘Osmanlis’ fellow
Muslims and fellow Turks. Adjoining the Khanate of the Crimea on the
east, the sister Khanate of AstrakhSn commanded the mouth of the
Volga, while the Khanate of Q 3 zan, whose likewise Turkish-speaking
Muslim inhabitants had once been known as ‘the White Bulgars’, com¬
manded the confluence of the Volga with the Kama and thereby
blocked the way from Muscovy both down the Volga and across the
southern Urals. Behind this front extending from the Qazanlys' western
frontier on the Volga to the ‘Osmanlis’ western frontier on the Adriatic,
the Iranic Muslim World extended south-eastwards over Bashkiristan
and Qazaqistan and the Tarim Basin to the north-western Chinese
provinces of Kansu and Shensi, and over Iran and Hindustan to Bengal
and the Deccan.

This massive Islamic road-block was a challenge which evoked a
proportionately energetic response from pioneer communities in the
two blockaded Christian societies.

In Western Christendom the peoples of the Atlantic seaboard in¬
vented in the fifteenth century a new type of ocean-going sailing-ship,
three-masted and square-rigged, with a sprinkling first of lateen and
later of fore-and-aft sails, which was capable of keeping the sea for
months on end without putting into port and which earned, by its
unprecedented performance, the distinction of being known as ‘the
ship’ par excellence for the next three and a half centuries. 2 In such

they had been invented, to the maritime peoples on the Mediterranean and Atlantic
seaboards of Western Chriatendom. 1 Sec II. »• 445 -

a This sudden swift advance in the arts of ship-building and navigation in Western
Christendom in the fifteenth century, and the period of relative stagnation that followed
until the nineteenth century brought another sudden swift advance, are reviewed in
XI. ix. 364-74.

218 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
vessels, Portuguese mariners, who had made their trial runs in deep-sea
navigation by discovering Madeira circa a.d. 1420 and the Azores in a.d.
1432, succeeded in outflanking the Arab seafront on the Atlantic by
rounding Cape Verde in a.d. X445, reaching the Equator in a.d. 1471,
rounding the Cape of Good Hope in a.d. 1487-8, landing at Calicut, on
the west coast of India, in a.d. 1498, seizing command of the Straits of
Malacca in a.d. 1511, and pushing on into the Western Pacific to show
their flag at Canton in a.d. 1516 and on the coast of Japan in a.d. 1542-3.'
In a flash the Portuguese had snatched out of Arab hands the thalasso-
cracy of the Indian Ocean; and, though the Portuguese afterwards lost
all but a remnant of their naval and commercial empire in the East to
Dutch, English, and French Western rivals of theirs, the Arabs were
never able to win their lost thalassocracy back. 2 The blockade of Western
Christendom by an Arabic World that had outflanked it overland in
Africa had not only been broken; it had been inverted into a maritime
blockade of the Arabic World by Western Christendom through the
Westerners’ newly acquired command of a ubiquitous Ocean. 1

While these eastward-faring Portuguese pioneers in a sudden over¬
seas expansion of the Western World were thus outflanking an Arabic
Muslim World on the south, eastward-faring Cossack river-boatmen
were as suddenly and sweepingly extending the borders of the Russian
World by outflanking an Iranic Muslim World on the north. The way
was opened for them by the Muscovite Tsar Ivan IV when he conquered
Qazan in a.d. 1552; for Qazan had been the Iranic World’s north¬
eastern bastion, and after its fall there was no obstacle except forest and
frost, which were the Nomad-fighting Cossacks’ familiar allies, to
prevent these pioneers of a Russian Orthodox Christendom from passing
the Urals and rapidly working their way eastwards along the Siberian
waterways until they were brought to a halt by stumbling in a.d. 1638 4
on the Pacific Ocean and then, on the 24th March, 1652, on the north¬
eastern marches of the Manchu Empirc. s In reaching these new frontiers
an expanding Russian World had outflanked not only the Iranic Muslim
World but the whole of the Eurasian Steppe 6 —a waterless inland sea
which Timur Lenk had neglected to turn into an Iranic ‘lake’ when the
opportunity for extending his empire round all its coasts had presented
itself to him in the fourteenth century. 7 The Iranic World now had to
pay the penalty for Timur’s lack of vision. Before Timur’s day a nascent
Iranic Muslim Civilization had succeeded in capturing the Turkish¬
speaking western half of a latter-day Eurasian Nomad World through

* Sec p. 313, n. 2, below.

* The one successful counter-stroke which the Arabs did achieve against the Portu¬
guese in their decline was their ejection of this first wave of Western intruders not only
from Maskat [circa a.d. 1648) and from the rest of ‘Uman, but also from the cast coast
of Africa, as far south as Zanzibar inclusive, in the course of the seventeenth and eigh¬
teenth centuries of the Christian Era; but this was only an ephemeral Arab recovery in
the interval between two waves of Western expansion. In the nineteenth century the
Westerners easily defeated the Arabs in the competition between them for the opening
up of the interior of the African continent.

a See VII. vii, $35 and XII. ix. 460-70- 4 Sec II. ii. 157 and V. v. 206-7.

s See Ravenstein, E. G.: The Russians on the Amur (London 1861, TrQbner), p. 21.

6 The Cossacks’ emulation of the exploits of the Portuguese has been noticed in III.
iii. 19; IV. iv. 497 - 8 ; and V. v. 315-16. 7 See IV. iv. 491-501.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 219

the conversion of the three western appanages of the Mongol Empire to
the Sunni form of Islam ;* and, on the eve of the Russian conquest of
Western Siberia, this victory of the Iranic Civilization in this quarter had
been rounded off by the conversion of the Khanate of Sibir; but the
Iranic Civilization never went on to capture the Mongol-speaking
eastern half of Eurasia on the farther side of the Zungarian Gap; and in
a.d. 1576-7 the Mongols—followed by the Calmucks circa a.d. 1620—
abandoned a primitive paganism, not, like their western cousins, for
Islam, but for the Tantric Mahayanian form of Buddhism which had
been preserved in a Tibetan fastness by a fossil of an extinct Indie
Civilization. 1

Thus, in the course of little more than a century reckoning from the
date of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror’s death in a.d.
1481, an Islamic World into which the Iranic and Arabic societies had
coalesced since the conquest of Syria and Egypt by Sultan Selim I in
a.d. 1516-17 3 had been not only outflanked on two sides but completely
encircled by the pioneering enterprise of Portuguese sailors, Cossack
backwoodsmen, and Lama missionaries. By the turn of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries the noose was round the victim’s neck; and,
what was more, he had by then already been foiled in divers attempts to
break out of the toils. This failure was a signal one in view of his posses¬
sion of the interior lines (the one advantage that had not only been left
to him, but had been weighted still more heavily in his favour by his
opponents’ far-flung encircling operations); and he was now inexorably
condemned to die by strangulation whenever an alien executioner might
choose to draw the fatal bow-string tight. Yet the suddenness with which
the Islamic World had been caught in this potential stranglehold was
not so extraordinary as the length of the time that was still to elapse
before either the Muslims’ adversaries or the Muslims themselves were
to become sufficiently alive to the situation to be moved to take action—
on the Western and the Russian side, action to pounce upon an appar¬
ently helpless prey, and, on the Muslim side, action to escape from
apparently desperate straits.

The Postponement of the Crisis

The Islamic World’s Western and Russian adversaries were slow to
close in upon their quarry, even when they seemed to have it at their
mercy; and, when they did venture, their timidity and procrastination
were justified in the event by a succession of discouraging military
experiences. In the Ottoman recoil from the disastrous outcome of the
second Ottoman siege of Vienna in a.d. 1682-3, which marked the
visible turn of the tide in the warfare between the Islamic World and
the West on a Danubian front, the Hapsburg counter-offensive was
repelled in a.d. 1689 and again in a.d. 1738-9—this second time,
definitively. When the Venetians took the opportunity of the Ottoman

x These were jQji’s portion on the steppe between the Altai and the Carpathians;
Chaghauy’s portion astride the Zungarian Gap; and Huligu’s portion in Iran and
'Iraq.

* See III. iii. 4*1; IV. iv. 497; V. v. 137 and 309-10.

3 See I. i. 387-8, and xi, maps 50 and ji.

220 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Power’s momentary collapse to conquer the Morea in and after a.d.
1684, they were made to pay for their temerity by losing in a.d. 1715
not only this ephemeral acquisition but their ancient possession the
Island of Tinos into the bargain. Peter the Great took the same opportu¬
nity to capture the fortress-port of Azov in a.d. 1696; but, when he was
emboldened by this success to invade Moldavia in a.d. 1711, at a moment
when he had relieved himself of pressure from Sweden by his sensational
victor)- over Charles XII at Poltava in a.d. 1709, he had to surrender the
precious maritime outlet that he had won for Russia in an inner recess
of an inland sea that was still a Turkish lake, as the price of being allowed
to escape annihilation in Moldavia at the hands of an Ottoman army
that had caught the rash invader in its grip. The first Muslim populations
of any appreciable size to pass under Western rule were those in Java,
which the Dutch acquired in a.d. 1600-84, 1 ant * Bengal, which the
British acquired in a.d. 1757-60; but these were two outlying enclaves
on the Islamic World’s extreme south-eastern edge; and, when the
British, after having conquered all the rest of India east of the Indus
Valley, proceeded in a.d. 1838 to trench on the core of Dar-al-Islam by
invading Afghanistan, they suffered a disaster there which took the
Western aggressors aback and changed the course of history.

In a.d. 1952 the greater part of this core, from Afghanistan to Egypt
and from Turkey to the Yaman, was free from alien political rule or even
control. By that date Egypt, Jordan, the Lebanon, Syria, and ’Iraq had
all rc-cmcrgcd from beneath the flood of British and French imperialism
which had submerged them successively in a.d. 1882 and in the course
of the General War of a.d. 1914-18, and the residual threat to the inte¬
grity and independence of the heart of the Arabic World was now com¬
ing, not from the Western Powers, but from the Zionists. The homeland
of the Ottoman Turks in Anatolia had likewise emerged intact from an
attempt to carve a Greek empire out of it in a.d. 1919-22. In a.d. 1952
the two principal exceptions to the freedom from alien rule which was
being enjoyed for the most part by the core of Dar-al-Isl 5 m were the
Far West of the Arabic Muslim World in North-West Africa, which had
fallen into the hands of France, and the Far East of the Iranic Muslim
World in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, which had fallen into the hands of
Russia. Elsewhere, D 5 r-al-Islam had merely been shorn of outlying
fringes in India, Indonesia, and Rumclia and of imperfectly reclaimed
hinterlands—such as the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe and
its adjuncts the Crimea and the Caucasus, which Russia had acquired
since a.d. 1774, and the interior of Tropical Africa, which the West
European Powers had partitioned among themselves since a.d. iSSo. 1
The slowness of the Modern Western World’s advance at the Islamic
World’s expense can be measured by its history in the Maghrib.

In the past, this Mediterranean island, cut off, as it was, from both the

1 By A.D. 1684 the Dutch had become masters of Western Java ar.d paramount in the
rest of the island; but it was not till a.d. 1830 that the whole of Java was brought under
effective Dutch rule.

J A possible relation of cause and effect between the success of the Islamic World in
preserving its independence in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era and the ill
success of the contemporary Panislamic Movement is discussed on pp. 692-5, below.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 22 i
Nile Valley and the Western Sudan by the dry sea of the Sahara, had
been apt to experience the same fortunes as the Iberian Peninsula and
Sicily, with which it was in closer touch across the waters of the Western
Mediterranean; and, when, at the dawn of a Modern Age of Western
history, the union of Aragon with Castile in a.d. 1479 was followed by
the Spanish conquest of Granada in a.d. 1492 and by the rounding off of
the Aragonese insular empire in Sardinia and Sicily through the Spanish
conquest of Naples in a.d. 1503, it might have been expected that the
North-West African countries opening on to the Mediterranean would
now fall to Spain, and the Atlantic coast of Morocco to Portugal. The
Portuguese had, indeed, begun to carve out a transmarine Algarve on
the Moroccan side of the Straits of Gibraltar in a.d. 1415-71, and the
Spaniards followed suit by holding Tripoli from a.d. 1510 to a.d. 1551
and imposing their suzerainty on the Hafsid princes of Tunisia from
a.d. 1535 10 A - D - I 574 ! but these prizes were snatched by the ‘Osmanlis
out of the Spaniards’ hands after the Ottoman corsair Uruj Barbarossa
of Lesbos’ had audaciously driven a wedge between the Spaniards and
the Portuguese by establishing himself in Algeria in a.d. 1516-18.* All
that eventually remained of this abortive Spanish empire in the Maghrib
was a tenuous chain of presidios clinging to peninsulas and islets along
the rocky shore of the Moroccan Rif; and the incipient Portuguese
empire along the Atlantic coast was excised by the Moroccans single-
handed, without Ottoman aid. When King Sebastian of Portugal set out
to complete the Portuguese conquest of Morocco in a.d. 1578, the royal
invader and his army paid for their aggression with their lives, and
Portugal with the loss of her independence for sixty years. 1

Thereafter, until after the opening of the nineteenth century of the
Christian Era, the Barbary Corsairs—unconquered by the Franks and
unamenable to the Porte—preyed on the shipping of all Western
Christian maritime Powers whose governments did not submit to paying
them an annual tribute. It was not till a.d. 1803-5 that the Tripolitanians
were chastised by the United States, and not till a.d. 28x6 that an inter¬
national squadron commanded by Lord Exmouth made it clear to the
rulers of all the Barbary States that their piracy would no longer be
tolerated by Western Christian Powers who now at last had their hands
free from the Napoleonic Wars. The definitive Western Christian con¬
quest of the Far West of the Islamic World did not begin till the French
landed at Algiers in a.d. 1830 to find there for France a substitute for
the empire which she had not succeeded in imposing on Europe; and
104 years were to elapse between this first French landing on the North-
West African coast and the submission to France of the last unsubdued
tribes in the Atlas in a.d. 1934. A spectator of the Spanish landing at
Goletta in a.d. 1535 who had supposed himself to be witnessing the
political annexation of the Maghrib to Western Christendom would have
been just four hundred years out of his reckoning.

' It is perhsps not fanciful to suggest that Barbarossa’a prowess at sea was an in¬
heritance from the age-old Greek inhabitants and medieval Italian masters of his native
island.

* See I. i. 348; p. 104 - 5 . above; X. ix. 37-38.

1 Portugal was engulfed in the Spanish Monarchy from A.D. 1581 to A.D. 1640.

222 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

Why had both the West and Russia been so slow in taking the offen¬
sive against an hereditary enemy at their gates ? And why, after they had
at last tasted blood, had they not managed to devour more than the
extremities of this Tityos’s carcase? In a list of reasons for the Islamic
World’s rather surprising reprieve we may include the initial sclf-confi-
dcncc with which the Muslims had been inspired by the memory of
extraordinary previous achievements; the subsequent tactical victories
that masked their strategical defeat in their attempts to break out of the
toils of Western and Russian encirclement; the long-lasting effect of
these impressive Muslim successes in inducing the Westerners to take the
Muslims at their own valuation; the leading Modern Western peoples’
loss of interest in the Mediterranean for some three hundred years after
their conquest of the Ocean towards the close of the fifteenth century;
and the mutual frustration of the rival competitors for the spoils of the
Islamic World after the Western Powers and Russia had at last become
aware that the once formidable titan now lay at their mercy.

The Muslims’ initial self-confidence was indeed well-founded; for
both the sister Islamic societies had done mighty deeds in their infancy.
In the thirteenth century of the Christian Era the Arabic Muslim
Society had performed in real life the infant H6rakles’ legendary feat of
strangling, each with a single hand, the two snakes sent by his pcrsccu-
tress Hera to devour the babe in his cradle. This Herculean prowess
had been displayed by the Arabic Muslim Society in saving itself from
the peril of being overwhelmed by a hostile combination between two
formidable Christian aggressors when in a.d. 1260 the Far Eastern
Christians, with the united forces of a Eurasian Nomadism at their
back, had pushed across the Euphrates into Syria as far as Damascus,
while the Western Christian Crusaders were still holding a bridgehead
on the Syrian coast no farther away than Acre. 1 This thirteenth-century
Arabic Muslim prodigy of self-preservation was matched in the four¬
teenth and fifteenth centuries by the Iranic Muslim Society’s not less
remarkable aggressive feat of conquering the main body of Orthodox
Christendom. With these achievements to their credit, the Muslims
took it for granted that they were invincible; and their consequent
moral and prestige long continued to compensate for their increasing
technological inferiority to their Modern Western and Westernizing
adversaries.

This prestige and moral were buoyed up by the Muslims’ subsequent
tactical victories in their strategically unsuccessful attempts to break out
of a ring that had been run round them by their Christian neighbours; 1
for the superficial successes immediately made their mark, while the
underlying failures long escaped notice.

In the Mediterranean, for example, the ‘Osmanlis’ sixteenth-century

1 See II. ii. 238 and 451. and p. 255, below.

1 The history of the Islamic World's long-drawn-out struggle with the Western
Powers and Russia from the sixteenth century onwards had much in common with the
history of Germany’s struggle with the same adversaries in the first and second world
wars; and indeed in the First World War Germany and Turkey were in the same camp.
The Muslims, like the Germans, won battle after battle without being able to save them¬
selves by these victories from eventually losing the war.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 223
success in defeating Spain’s attempt to gain possession of the Maghrib,'
and the Barbary Corsairs’ subsequent thalassocracy in the Mediterranean
on sufferance from Western maritime Powers prc-occupicd with Oceanic
enterprises, obscured the ‘Osmanlis’ far more significant failure to break
through to the coast of the Atlantic and compete with the Western
Christian Powers for possession of the Americas. 1 The ‘Osmanlis’
capture of Rhodes from the Knights of Saint John in a.d. 1522 was
likewise more sensational, though less significant, than their subsequent
inability to expel the Knights from their new naval base on the Island of
Malta.

The ‘Osmanlis did break through to the Indian Ocean after their
conquest of Egypt in a.d. 1517; and their subsequent defeats by the
Portuguese off Diu in a.d. 1538 3 and in Abyssinia in a.d. 1542-3 4 were
more momentous than either their victory in the same year a.d. 1538
off Preveza or their reverse in a.d. 1571 at Lepanto in an unprofitable
struggle with the Mediterranean Western maritime Powers for the
command of a land-locked sea whose narrow outlet into the Atlantic was
out of the ‘Osmanlis’ reach. If, instead of having to submit to being
bottled up in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf as tightly as in the
Mediterranean, Ottoman sea-power had been able to retrieve the recent
failure of Egyptian sea-power to sweep the Indian Ocean clear of the
Portuguese intruders, the ‘Osmanlis might have become the heirs of the
Indian Muslim princes of Gujerat and have anticipated the descendants
of their ancient enemy Timur Lcnk in becoming the Turkish Muslim
founders of an Indian universal state. This historic Ottoman failure in
the Indian Ocean attracted less attention, however, than either the sub¬
sequent feats of other Muslim Powers on the Indian mainland 5 or the
‘Osmanlis’ own antecedent feat of swallowing up an Egyptian Mamluk
Empire which had been the leading Power in the Arabic World for a
quarter of a millennium.

This amalgamation of the Mamluk with the Ottoman Empire was
indeed a conspicuous alteration of the political map. Yet the ‘Osmanlis’
acquisition of the Egyptian portage between the Mediterranean and the
Red Sea, which gave them the strategic advantage of holding the interior
lines in a contest in the Indian Ocean with the Portuguese circumnavi¬
gators of Africa, proved barren after all when the ‘Osmanlis failed
nevertheless to wrest the command of the Indian Ocean out of Portu¬
guese hands. Nor did the concentration of Islamic forces through the
union of Egypt and other Arabic countries with the Ottoman Empire in
the sixteenth century make up for the fatal disruption of the Iranic
World, at the beginning of the same century, through the sudden rise of
a militantly anti-Ottoman Safawl Shi'ite Power in the Iranic World’s
heart. 6 In the ensuing struggle in the Indian Ocean between the

See p. 22 x, above.
See II. ii.

1 bee II. u. 444-5-

. 445. 4 See II. ii. 365-6 and 445.

* In a.d. 1565 the Muslim conquest of the Indian sub-continent was completed by
the Dcccancse Muslim Powers’ feat of overthrowing and partitioning the Hindu Empire
of Vijayanagar (see V. v. 515, with n. 1). In a.d. 1572 the Muslim power in India was
concentrated into an oecumenical r 5 j through the Timurid Mughal pnnee Akbar s
conquest of Gujcrit in that year. 6 See I. i. 366-88.

224 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
‘Osmanlis and the Portuguese, the Portuguese partly owed their victory
to a schism in the Iranic Muslim camp which enabled the Portuguese
to win the ‘Osmanlis’ Safawl enemies for their allies instead of finding
themselves confronted with a united Iranic World.

On the Danubian front, likewise, the ‘Osmanlis’ strategic reverse in
a.d. 1529, when they failed to capture Vienna and thereby failed to
crack the still tender carapace of a new-born Danubian Hapsburg
Monarchy, 1 was eclipsed in the eyes of contemporaries by the preceding
overthrow of Hungary in a.d. 1526 in the last round of a Hungaro-
Ottoman Hundred Years’ War. Contemporary Western observers
shuddered to sec a Western Christian kingdom go the way of its Ortho¬
dox Christian neighbours. Yet the carving of a new pashalyq of Buda
out of Western Christendom’s south-eastern flank, which was all that
the Ottoman Empire eventually gained from the Battle of Mohacz, was
a trifling advantage by comparison with the adverse effect of the other
consequences of this battle on Ottoman prospects of farther expansion
in this quarter. The severity of the disaster that had overtaken Hungary
stimulated the Western World to provide itself with a Danubian Haps¬
burg carapace which, in the next chapter of the story, proved strong
enough, in the two ordeals of a.d. 1529 and a.d. 1682-3, to resist the
heaviest blows that Ottoman armies could deliver at this distance from
their base of operations.

Vienna, like Tabriz, was just too far beyond the ‘Osmanlis’ effective
range to go the way of Buda and Erzinjan; and it was noteworthy how
small a quota of the Western World’s total energies had to be mobilized
in order to hold the ‘Osmanlis at bay in the Burgenland. The personal
union, under the House of Hapsburg, of an unconquered remnant of
the territories of the Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen with the terri¬
tories of the Bohemian Crown and with the Hapsburgs’ own hereditary
possessions in south-eastern Germany sufficed to bring the ‘Osmanlis
to a halt on the eastern glacis of Vienna; 2 and the West European
countries proved able with impunity to ignore the Ottoman peril while
they were harvesting the opportunities which their conquest of the
Ocean had brought within their grasp, and were contending with one
another for possession of these trans-occanic spoils.

The political schism between the Hapsburg Power and France and
religious schism between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, which
rent Western Christendom in the sixteenth century, were proportionately
no less devastating than the contemporary breach in the Iranic Muslim
World between a Sunni Ottoman and a Shi'ite Safawl Power; and a
sixteenth-century France might have been as valuable an ally for the
Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean as a sixteenth-century Safawl
Empire was for Portugal in the Indian Ocean. The French Mediter¬
ranean naval port of Toulon did harbour an Ottoman fleet in the winter
of a.d. 1543-4; yet Toulon never became an Ottoman counterpart of
the Portuguese base at Ormuz; and in the Mediterranean, as on the
Danube, the Hapsburg Power managed to keep the 'Osmanlis in check
notwithstanding the diversions made by its Western Christian rivals in
• See II. ii. 179 and V. v. 325. » See II. ii. 179.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 225

its rear. This ability of the Modem Western World to fight off with one
hand the Islamic World’s efforts to break out, while the members of the
Western body politic were warring all the time with one another, gives
the true measure of the Western World’s superiority over the Islamic
World in strength even in an age in which the Ottoman Power stood at
its zenith.

The least noticed, but not least signal, of all these sixteenth-century
Ottoman strategic reverses was a failure to undo a master-move in a
Russian encircling movement. The year a.d. 1569' witnessed the dis¬
comfiture of an Ottoman expeditionary force which had been sent via
the Crimea to break a recently acquired Muscovite hold on the line of
the Lower Volga 2 and to bring this vital waterway within the Ottoman
Empire’s reach by digging a canal from the nearest point on the Don to
connect the Volga with the Black Sea. This abortive Ottoman thrust into
the Eurasian Steppe was an attempt to reverse a previous change in the

S olitical map which had been to the ‘Osmanlis’ serious disadvantage.

ince the opening of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era the
'Osmanlis had suddenly and unexpectedly been cut off from access
overland, both south and north of the Caspian, to their Sunni co¬
religionists in Central Asia and India. South of the Caspian, the road had
been blocked by the establishment of a Safawl Empire extending from
the Caspian to the Persian Gulf; north of the Caspian, it had been
blocked by two successive Russian forward moves. 3 The year a.d. 1502
saw the eviction of the last of the epigoni of Chingis Khan’s son Juji
from the saray (Russict Tsaritzyn) on the bank of the Middle Volga. 4
Thereafter, in a.d. i 552-4, the Muscovites had conquered not only this
Mongol horde’s successor-state of Qazan, commanding the confluence
of the Volga with the Kama, 5 but also its successor-state of Astrakhan,
commanding the Volga’s mouth. If the 'Osmanlis had succeeded in
ejecting the Muscovites from the line of the Lower Volga in a.d. 1569,
they would have cleared for themselves a path over the Eurasian Steppe
north of the Caspian along which they could have joined hands with
their Uzbeg Turkish co-religionists who had recently conquered the
Oxus-Jaxartcs Basin from the Timurids, 6 and with the Khans of Sibir,

1 Sec Inalcik, H.: The Origin of the Olto’itan-Russian Rivalry and the Don-Volga Canal
(X569) (Ankara 1948, Tdrk Tarih Kurunui Basimevi), and the present Study, I. i. 374,
n. 2, and II. ii. 44s.

* In the General War of a.d. 1939-45, the line of the Lower Volga was the scene of
one of the decisive battles of history (eommissum 22 Nov. 1942-2 Feb. 1943). The out¬
come of the military operations in the ssme theatre in A.D. 1560, which was perhaps of
equal importance, was consummated without any direct clash of arms between the
Russian forces and the alien invader. In a.d. 1569 the Grand Vizier Mchmcd SbkflllO’s
grand design of reopening the severed communications between the Ottoman Empire
and the Sunni Muslim Turkish states of Central Asia by opening up a Don-Volga inland
waterway between the Black Sea and the Caspian was frustrated, without any need for
military intervention on Muscovy’s part, by the ill will and bad faith of the Khan of the
Crimea and by the insubordination of the Janissaries, whose Rumelian souls revolted

against a prospect of having to pass the winter in a clime that was far bleaker than an
Azerbaijanian Qarabfigh (see I. i. 386). _ 1 See I. i. 398.

* Sadly stood on the left bank of the Volga, in the an$le of its westward bend adjoining
the eastward bend of the Don. On the opposite bank in a.d. 1556 the Russians built a
fort called Tsaritzyn which became famous in A.D. 1942-3 under the name of Stalingrad.

s See p. 217, above.

6 See I. i. 371-5. Requests received by the Porte from the Khans of Khiva (Khwi-
rizm), Bukhara, and Samarqar.d for Ottoman action to reopen the pilgrimage route, via

B 2 S 9 S.vui I

226 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
whose horde on the Great Northern Bay of the Eurasian Steppe, in the
Tobol Basin east of the Ural Mountains, was converted to Sunnism 1
on the morrow of the 'Osmanlis’ abortive expedition to the Volga and on
the eve of the Cossacks’ subsequent successful passage of the Urals.

If, in a.d. 1569, the ‘Osmanlis had attained their military objective,
three important political results would have followed. The Sunn! Muslim
World, which had been split asunder by the eruption of Imami Shi'ism
in Iran, would have been reunited along a corridor to the north of the
Caspian; the resurgent Shi’i Power would have been encircled and pos¬
sibly crushed; and the threat to which the Islamic World’s north¬
eastern flank had been exposed by the Russian conquest of Qazan in
a.d. 1552 would have been neutralized, since the Cossacks’ passage of
the Urals in a.d. 1586 would have been forestalled by the erection of an
effective Islamic barrier across the next stage of their eastward path. The
Cossacks’ fire-arms would not have been able to make the short work
that they did make of the Siberian Tatars’ resistance if the Tatar archers
had been reinforced by Ottoman matchlock-men who could have fought
the Cossacks on equal terms. 2

In the event, the reverse suffered by the 'Osmanlis on the Don-Volga
Steppe in a.d. i 569 not only left the way open for the Cossacks to pour
over the Urals into Siberia; it gave the signal for them to perform,
before the close of the sixteenth century, the more audacious feat of
sealing the severance of the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe
from its heartland east of the Caspian by bounding forward from the
line of the Dniepr to the lines of the Don, the Terek, and the Yaik. 3
This triple Cossack reinforcement of a Muscovite breakwater along the
line of the Lower Volga that had held firm against the ‘Osmanlis created
a system of defence in depth that was too strong to be breached by the
Nomads. The last of all the eruptions of Eurasian Nomadism did sweep
across the Yaik and the Volga in a.d. 1616; but it was halted at the line
of the Don and never reached the line of the Dniepr; 4 and the Nomads
who rode out on this forlorn hope were not Turkish-speaking proselytes
of an Iranic Muslim Civilization but Mongol-speaking Calmuck neo¬
phytes of a Tantric Mahayanian Church which had survived as a fossil
in a Tibetan fastness.

It will be seen that the failure of the Ottoman attempt to break into
the heart of the Eurasian Steppe in a.d. 1569 was fraught with the gravest
consequences for the Islamic World; but the significance of this Ottoman
reverse was obscured by the continuance, for at least 160 years thcrc-

AstrakhSn, from Central Asia to Mecca, which the Russian occupation of Astrakhan had
closed, appear to have weighed with the Porte in the taking of its decision to launch the
adventurous expedition of a . d . 1569 (see Inalcik, op. cit., pp. 68 and 73). The Porte was
sensitive to such appeals because its prestige in a Sunni Muslim World was bound up
with ita title to the guardianship of the Two Holy Cities of the Hij 5 z, which it had taken
over from the Mamlflk Sultan of Egypt when it had extinguished the MamlOk Power
in A.D. 15x7. « See p. 219, above.

2 A trial of strength in Western Siberia in the last quarter of the sixteenth century
between 'Osmanlis and Muscovites, both cauippcd with fire-arms of Modem Western
origin, would have been a counterpart of the similar contest that actually took place
between Ottoman and Portuguese matchlock-men in Abyssinia in a.d. 1542-3 (we II.
11. 36C-6 and 445 ).

* Sec II. ii. 157 and V. v. 314-15.

4 See V. v. 3x5.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 227

after, of Crimean Tatar slave-raids into Muscovite territory. In a book
published in a.d. 1668 an English observer, Sir Paul Rycaut, estimated
that, at the time when he was making his observations, the average
annual import of slaves from Krim Tatary to Constantinople was at
least tw-enty-thousand head. 1 Russia continued to suffer from this
scourge throughout the reign of Peter the Great, and an effective Russian
limes in the Ukraine was not constructed till a.d. 1730-4, in the reign of
the Empress Anna. 2 Though these slave-raids were of no military
importance, 3 they sustained the illusion that the Ottoman Empire was
on the offensive, and Muscovy on the defensive, for more than a century
and a half after the roles had been reversed in fact.

This mirage of an unimpaired Islamic military power long continued
to bemuse, not only the Muslims themselves, but also their Western
adversaries. The continuing prestige of the Islamic Civilization in
Western eyes is attested by the continuance into the eighteenth century'
of conversions to Islam among Western Christians who were neither
victims of the Barbary slave-raiders nor prisoners of war, but were
voluntary entrants into the Ottoman service. 4 The non-converted
Western Christian employee of the Porte was a rare figure before the
nineteenth century and cut a poor figure during the first half of it; s and,

' Rycaut, Sir Paul: The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London 1668, Starkey
and Bromc), p. Sr, cited in III. iii. 35, n. 3.

* Sec Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire (Oxford 1949, Black-
well), p. is, n. 3.

1 For their social and religious importance sec the passage quoted from Rycaut’a
book, loc. cit., in V. v. no.

4 In Egypt in A.D. 1801, one of the commanders of the Ottoman forces cooperating
with the British expeditionary force against the French was a renegade whose original
name had been Campbell (Walsh, T.: Journal of the Late Campaign in Egypt (London
1803, Cadell and Davies), p. 66). The sensational ‘conversion’ of the French general
Menou to Islam during the French occupation of Egypt in A.D. 1798-1801 was almost
certainly insincere.

s The outstanding eighteenth-century representative of his kind was the French
military officer Baron de Tott, who was employed by the Porte, during the Great Russo-
Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74, to fortify the Dardanelles in the Western style of the day
after a Russian fleet from the Baltic had confounded all Turkish notions of geography

a appearing in the Mediterranean and destroying the Ottoman fleet in the Battle of
tshme {commitmm 7 July, a.d. 1770). The allegation that dc Tott became a convert
to Islam is denied by his English translator (Memoirs of the Baron de Tott on the Turks
and the Tartars, translated from the French by an English gentleman at Paris under the
immediate inspection of the Baron (London 178c, Jarvis, 2 vols.), vol. i,pp. xvii-xxiv):

‘Mr. de Tott has stated to the translator the impracticability of the Turks receiving
any essential permanent instructions from the Europeans, on this... principle, viz. that,
the instant their instructor becomes a Mahometan, he is looked upon as a fellow subject
and is reduced to a level with themselves, besides the contempt naturally attending a
forced conversion; and, if he remains a Christian, he has insuperable obstacles to over¬
come, even with the unusual and improbable protection and firmness of 0 Sultan
Mustapha. Amongst others, the famous Mr. dc Bonneval, whose history made so much
noise at the beginning of this century, may be rated as an example of the truth of this
observation. No Christian con ever be more respectably situated than Mr. de Tott; yet
even his regulations produced only a momentary effect, and are already fallen into decay’
(ibid., pp. xx-xxi).

The translator supports Baron de Tott’s contention by going on to report two anec¬
dotes related to him by the Baron himself. Incidentally the Baron testified ‘that he had
never received a farthing from the Porte, nor any other appointment than that of his
own Court’ (ibid., p. xxi).

Sixty-five years or so later, the position of Frankish employees in the Ottoman service
was still what it had been in de Tott’s day, on the testimony of the famous Prussian
soldier Hclmuth von Moltke, who served an apprenticeship in the Ottoman Empire in
the years a.d. 1835-1839 as a member of a Prussian military mission to the Porte. Von
Moltke records that at this date the Ottoman high command could not venture to outrage

228 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
even after the renegade had ceased to be the typical Western employee
in Dar-al-Isl 5 m, a Western homage to the attractiveness of the Islamic
culture which had formerly taken the radical form of religious conversion
to the Islamic Faith was still paid in the superficial, yet nevertheless
psychologically significant, form of the wearing of Islamic dress by
Western Christian travellers in the Islamic World, as well as by Western
Christian residents there. While this change of costume had the effect of
serving as a practical precaution against the danger of arousing a Muslim
population’s latent fanaticism by flaunting Frankish clothes which, in
early nineteenth-century Muslim eyes, were still the badge of Unbelief, 1
the primary motive was never this utilitarian one, but was always a sense
of admiration; 2 and this hard-dying homage of the Modern West to
Islam did not cease till it extinguished itself by losing its sincerity and
evaporating into an affectation 3 that is amusingly satirized in Kinglake’s
portrait* of the English aristocrat, Lady Hester Stanhope {vivebat a.d.
1776-1839), theatrically aping the part of a sultan’s mother 5 in her
dilapidated mansion in the Lebanon.

These psychological causes of the postponement, for some two
hundred years, of a doom to which the Islamic World had been
inexorably condemned before the sixteenth century was over, were
reinforced by an economic cause and a political one.

The economic cause was the commercial stagnation of the Mediter¬
ranean Sea for some three hundred years after the conquest of the Ocean
by the West European peoples at the close of the fifteenth century. In its

the Muslim feelings of even its Western-trained troops by ordering them to present
arms to officers who were gyaours, even when these gyaour officers were, like von Moltke
and his colleagues (and also like de Tott in his day), the servants of a foreign sovereign
and not of the Pidishlh. ‘We’, von Moltke writes, 'were highly distinguished individual
representatives of an abysmally low-rated category. ... As for Pranks who offer their
services to the Turks for pay, these naturally find themselves in an immeasurably poorer
position; and the natural result is that (with a few most honourable exceptions) the only
Franks who contrive to endure it are of the kind that is prepared to submit to every sort
of humiliation. People offer themselves as teachers in Turkey who have been bad pupils
at home’ (Moltke, H. von: Briefe iiber ZuslGndcn und Btgebenheilcn dir Tiirkei (Berlin
1841, Mittlcr), p. 414).

* According to a report from Col. Campbell to Sir John Bowring, incorporated in the
latter’s Report on Eg)'f>t and Can Jin dated the 27th March, 1839 (London 1840, Clowes),
p. 190, Frankish clothes were by that date commanding respect instead of exciting con¬
tempt in Egypt. In Damascus, on the other hand, Frankish clothes were still not to be
seen (Bowring, J.: Report on the Commercial Statistics oj Syria, dated the 17th July,
1839 (London 1840, Clowes), p. 92).

2 Perhaps the most remarkable of all Modern Western sartorial tributes to the abid¬
ing prestige of a decadent Islamic Civilization was the nineteenth-century and twentieth-
century French and British practice of dressing even European troops in uniforms of an
Islamic style. The Maghribi fez, jacket, and baggy trousers of the French zouave (suw-
war) had their counterpart in the turban worn by the English officer in a British Indian
cavalry regiment—a headgear which proclaimed the British Raj to be the Mughal Raj’s
heir.

1 See Clot-Bey, A. B.; Aperfu Gcntral sur L‘£gypte (Paris 1840, Fortin et Masson,
2 vols.), vol. ii, pp. 150-1.

* Kinglakc, A. W.: Eothtn (tst ed., 1844). chap. 8.

‘ The wife of an Ottoman sultan came into power if and when her son succeeded her
husband on the imperial throne; and an Herodotus would have noted with amusement
that the accident of becoming a widow, for which a woman was penalized in the Hindu
World by being sent to the funeral pyre to be burnt alive, and in the Western World
by being sent to the dower house to die of ennui there, was rewarded in the Islamic
World by the enjoyment, as a widowed mother, of a status and a licence never accorded
to a wife during her husband's lifetime.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 229

preoccupation with the task of opening up for itself this vaster and more
lucrative field of enterprise, 1 the West was content to abandon the
Levant to Ottoman Greek mariners 2 and the Western Mediterranean to
Barbary pirates 1 till, as a result of its very success in acquiring an
oecumenical empire by exploiting its command of oceanic routes, it had
built up in India and the Far East such substantial interests that the re¬
opening of a direct route between India and Western Europe now became
a matter of importance to West European governments and men of
business.

The chief landmark in the history of this change in the Western
attitude towards the Mediterranean was the British East India Com¬
pany’s acquisition of a virtual sovereignty over Bengal in a.d. 1757-60.
Thenceforward the finding of a short cut between a rapidly expanding
British Raj in India and this renascent Indian Empire’s new metropolis
in the British Isles became a more and more earnestly pursued object of
British policy, 4 and, in an age of Western ascendancy, this renewed
Western interest in the Mediterranean 5 spelled Western military and
political intervention in the life of the Islamic countries possessing
Mediterranean seaboards or situated on the land-bridge between the
Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. In the fifteenth century the
Western peoples’ main inducement to seek an ocqanic route, however
circuitous, from Western Europe to India had been the Western Powers’
inability to control a short route via the Mediterranean and the Red Sea
or the Persian Gulf, because this route was bestridden by Islamic
Powers whom the West was not then strong enough to coerce. In the
eighteenth century, Egypt and Syria were still in the hands of their
former Mamluk Muslim masters’ Ottoman Muslim conquerors and
successors, but by this date the ‘Osmanlis were no longer capable of
defending their empire against Western or Westernizing aggressors,
and the Western Powers could therefore now have, for the taking, a
Mediterranean route between India and Western Europe which would
not only be shorter than the Cape route but would also be as fully at
their command in the military and political circumstances of the day—
always supposing that the alien competitors for the Islamic World’s
spoils could agree with one another over the division of them.

As it turned out, this essential condition of agreement was never
attained, and the diplomatic and military energy expended in the nine¬
teenth and twentieth centuries by each of the Powers on thwarting its

« The West European peoples’ preoccupation with the Ocean and indifference to the
Mediterranean in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries is comparable to
the American people’s preoccupation with their own continent and indifference to
Europe in the nineteenth century.

* See pp. 173 - 7 . above. * See p. 121, above.

* See Hoskins, H. L.: British Routes to India (London 1028, Longmans Green). _

» The British had shown an interest in the Western Mediterranean since the begin¬
ning of the eighteenth century. They had acquired Gibraltar in A.D. 1704, campaigned
in Catalonia in A.D. 1704-12, and held Minorca from a.d. 1708 to a.d. 1782. The conflict
between Great Britain and France which led to these results was, however, a war of the
Spanish, not the Mughal or the Ottoman, succession; and, even after Malta had come
into British hands in a.d. 1798 in the Napoleonic round of the Anglo-French duel,
another generation was to pass before a through-route between England and India vis
the Mediterranean was to be established by the spanning of the gap between Malta and
Suez in the direct British line of communications between England and India.

230 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
rivals’ designs on the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire would
probably have sufficed to prolong the Ottoman Empire’s life for the
hundred years and more by which it actually exceeded its natural ex¬
pectation, even if the ‘Osmanlis themselves had never made the attempt
to save their house from destruction by reconstructing it in a Modern
Western style under the spur of shocking military defeats.

Though the discomfiture by British arms of a moribund Mughal
Empire’s local viceroy in Bengal might do little to upset Islamic com¬
placency, and might be regarded in the West mainly as an incident in a
struggle over India between Great Britain and France, the defeat of the
Ottoman Empire by Russia in the Great Russo-Turkish War of a.d.
1768-74 was taken everywhere as a portent; and, when in a.d. 1798 the
French descended upon the Ottoman dominion of Egypt, and overcame
all resistance there with ease, 1 as a step towards reopening in India a
contest with their British rivals which had been decided there against
France in the Seven Years’ War, even shrewd observers took it for
granted that they would live to see the Ottoman Empire partitioned
between France, Russia, Great Britain, and the Danubian Hapsburg
Monarchy. Yet this expectation, natural though it was at the time, was
not fulfilled in the event; for the only parts of the Ottoman Empire, with¬
in its frontiers of a.d. 1768, which were in the possession of any of those
foreign Powers in a.d. 1952 were the territories adjoining the north and
cast coasts of the Black Sea, from Bessarabia to Batum inclusive, which
had fallen to Russia; Cyprus, which had fallen to Great Britain; and
Tunisia and Algeria, which had fallen to France. As for the Danubian
Hapsburg Monarchy, which had held Bosnia-Herzegovina from a.d.
1878 to a.d. 1918 and the sanjaq of NovipazSr from a.d. 1879 to A D -

S »8, she had voluntarily evacuated Novipazar and had lost Bosnia-
rzegovina in the act of losing her own existence. 2 The lion’s share of
the Ottoman Empire of a.d. 1768, from Bosnia to the Yaman and from
Tripolitania 3 to Moldavia inclusive, had passed into the hands, not of
alien Great Powers, but of Orthodox Christian and Muslim successor-
states, of which the largest in area—apart from a mostly arid Sa'udI
Arabia—was a Turkish Republic stretching from Adrianoplc to Mount
Ararat.

This remarkable triumph of the nineteenth-century Western political
ideal of Nationalism on alien ground could hardly, however, have been
achieved by the feeble and discordant efforts of the surprisingly liberated
local peoples if the surrounding Great Powers had not thrust this prize
into their hands by frustrating one another and thereby creating a
political vacuum which, when the maintenance of Ottoman sovereignty

1 See IV. iv. 458-60.

1 The occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in and after a . d . 1878, and annexation of this
occupied Ottoman territory in a . d . 1908, had. indeed, been nails driven into the Haps¬
burg Monarchy’s coffin by its own statesmen’s hands, since these Hapsburg acts of
aggression against a moribund Ottoman Empire had had the effect of bringing the
Monarchy into a head-on collision with a youthful Serb nationalism.

> A ‘Libya’ consisting of Cyrcnaica, Tripolitania, and Fazzan, which had been con¬
quered from the Ottoman Empire by Italy in a.d. t 9 ir-r 2 , and from Italy by Great
Britain in the general war of A.D. I 939 " 45 . had attained independence on the 24th
December, 1951.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 231

proved no longer possible, all the Powers alike preferred to see occupied
by local successor-states rather than by any of the Great Powers’ own
number.

The suzerainty of the Porte over Egypt, for example, was prolonged,
after all, from a.d. 1798 to a.d. 1924 thanks in the first place to the
military intervention of Great Britain in a.d. 1801 —when British and
British Indian expeditionary forces cooperated with an Ottoman
expeditionary force in compelling the French invaders to capitulate—
and in the second place to the diplomatic intervention of all the Great
Powers of the day except France in a.d. 1840-1, when they compelled
the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Mehmcd 'All, not only to evacuate all
Asiatic territories of the Ottoman Empire but also to rcacknowledgc the
suzerainty of the Porte over the African Ottoman territories that were
being left in his hands, in consideration of his receiving from the Porte
a grant of the governorship of Egypt for himself and his heirs, and a
grant of the governorship of the Sudan for himself for life. In the next
chapter of Egyptian history the occupation of Egypt by Great Britain in
a.d. 1882 ended, not, as might have been expected, in the replacement of
Ottoman suzerainty by British sovereignty, but, like the French occupa¬
tion of a.d. 1798-1801, in an eventual evacuation—though in this chapter
of the story the Western occupation lasted fifty-four years (a.d. 1882-
1936) instead of three, and was followed, not by a reassertion of Ottoman
suzerainty, but by a general recognition of Egyptian independence.

In a different quarter, all but an outermost fringe of the Ottoman
dominions in Rumelia and Anatolia was saved from falling into Russia’s
hands by the diplomatic action of the other Powers in a.d. 1839 and a.d.
1878, and by the military intervention of three of them—France, Great
Britain, and Sardinia—on the Ottoman Empire’s behalf in the Crimean
War (gerebatur a.d. 1853-5); and Russia took an appropriate diplomatic
revenge when, in a.d. 1921, a nascent Soviet Union helped a nascent
Turkish Republic to save itself from an Anglo-Grcek attack which was
already being hampered by the hostility of France and Italy to any
further augmentation of their British ally’s power at Turkey’s expense.
Thanks to the stalemate of power politics in this long-drawn-out game
of chess, the Ottoman heritage in Anatolia and Rumelia was preserved
for eventual distribution between a Turkish Republic and the Ottoman
Empire’s South-East European successor-states.

The independence of Afghanistan, likewise, was preserved, not only
by the valour of the Afghans in the first and second Anglo-Afghan wars,
but by a rivalry between Great Britain and Russia which moved the
British to bolster up Afghanistan as a buffer-state between India and
Russia rather than to risk driving the Afghans into Russia’s arms by
attempting the completion of a conquest which would have been not
beyond Great Britain’s power, in spite of all Afghan efforts to resist it,
if the rival Russian Empire had not loomed up over the British Indian
horizon.

As for Persia and the Asiatic Arab successor-states of the Ottoman
Empire outside the Arabian Peninsula, their experience of Russian and
Western imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been,

232 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
down to the year a.d. 1952, much the same as Egypt’s. They had
managed, after all, to preserve their independence after having been
perilously caught in the toils. In a.d. 1952 Persia was still independent,
within frontiers that were approximately those with which she had
emerged from the Russo-Persian peace-settlement of a.d. i 828, though in
a.d. 1907 she had been subjected, without being consulted, to the begin¬
nings of a partition by the terms of the Anglo-Russian agreement of that
year. Her unity had been restored in a.d. 1917, when the Russian as well
as the ‘neutral’ and the British zone of Persia had fallen into the British
lion’s maw as a result of Russia’s collapse in the First World War; 1 and
her independence had been restored in a.d. 1921 when the Soviet Union
—seeking to protect her ‘soft under-belly’ by turning Persia, as well as
Turkey, into a buffer against British attack—constrained Great Britain
to withdraw her troops from Persian soil by a show of force on Persia’s
Caspian coast. As a result of the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution in the
First World War, ‘Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine had fallen into the
hands of Great Britain, and Syria and the Lebanon into the hands of
France; yet, in the sequel, none of these Arab countries had gone the
way that India and the Maghrib had gone during the hundred years
ending in a.d. 1914. All of them except Palestine had, after all, secured
at least a temporary independence as Arab national states—the French
mandated territories owing to the action of Great Britain on their behalf
during the Second World War—and the Palestinian Arabs had lost their
country neither to Great Britain nor to Russia but to the Zionists.

Thus the rivalries between Great Britain and France, between Great
Britain and Russia, and between Russia and the Danubian Hapsburg
Monarchy had preserved the political independence of the core of the
Islamic World within limits that have been indicated. 2 Each Power had
taken its turn in preventing its rivals from appropriating the heritage of
the Islamic Powers and their successor-states; but the Muslim peoples
had not been entirely passive beneficiaries of this favourable equilibrium
of alien political forces; for, though the military and political reverses
which they had suffered in and after a.d. 1768 had not put an end to
their political independence, the shock of successive disasters had
nevertheless brought into play the compelling motive of self-preserva¬
tion, and this spur had driven the Muslim peoples to enter reluctantly
upon a course of Westernization in which it had proved impossible to
call a halt when once the momentous initial step had been taken.

The Muslim Peoples' Military Approach to the Western Question

The clues to an understanding of the Muslim peoples’ approach to
‘the Western Question’ are to be found in three circumstances. At the
time when the impact of the Modern West became the dominant
problem in their lives, the Muslim peoples—like the Russians and unlike
the Ottoman Orthodox Christians at the corresponding crises in their
histories—were still politically their own masters; they were also the
heirs of a great military tradition which was the warrant of the Islamic

1 The short title by which the General War of a.d. 1914-18 was coming to be known
by the time of writing. a See p. 230, above.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 233

Civilization’s value in its children’s own eyes; and the sudden demon¬
stration of their latter-day military decadence by the unanswerable
logic of defeat in ordeal by battle 1 was as surprising to them as it was
humiliating.

The Muslims’ complacency over their historic military prowess was
so deeply ingrained in their souls that the lesson implicit in the turn of
the military tide in their Western adversaries’ favour in a.d. 1683 had
not yet made any appreciable impression on them by the time when,
little short of a hundred years later, this lesson was on the point of being
more sharply driven home. When, after the outbreak of war between
the Ottoman Empire and Russia in a.d. 1768, it was common knowledge
in Western Europe that the Russians were intending to bring into action
a navy in the Modern Western style of that day which they had built up
in the Baltic, the Porte declined to believe in the physical possibility of
navigating ships from the Baltic into the Mediterranean till a Russian
squadron duly turned up in the Levant to the consternation of an
adversary who was so obstinately unprepared to cope with it. 2 Even
after this painfully revealing Ottoman experience in the Great Russo-
Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74, the Egyptian Mamluks could not be
persuaded that they stood in any danger from their 'Osmanli conquerors’
latter-day Western pupils in the art of war. When the Mamluk war-lord
Mur 5 d Bey was warned by the Venetian business man Rosetti, the
doyen of the Frankish community in Egypt, that Napoleon’s seizure of
Malta might be the prelude to a descent on Egypt, Murad Bey burst out
laughing at the absurdity of such an idea; 3 and, on the very eve of the
catastrophe, the governor of Alexandria was equally impervious to a
still more urgent warning given him by a landing-party from Nelson’s
fleet. 4

The shock of the denouement was proportionately severe; 5 yet the
Mamluks’ humiliation in a.d. 1798 was not so painful as the ‘Osmanlis’
in a.d. 1774, for the Russians at whose hands the 'Osmanlis had suffered
their defeat were not even Franks; they were creatures of the same clay
as the ‘Osmanlis’ Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh , 6 and their country was
known to the ‘Osmanlis, not as a formidable military Power, but as
the happy hunting-ground of the ‘Osmanlis’ slave-raiding Krim Tatar

* The dramatic exposure of the decadence of the Egyptian Mamluks by a French
infantry whose equipment and training were originally derived from those of the Otto¬
man Janissaries in their prime has been noticed in IV. iv. 454-61.

* ‘Whilst the weakness of the government compelled it to shut its eyes to the excesses

of a licentious soldiery, the ministers strove to conceal the naval war which threatened
the Empire. No Russian vessel had ever made its appearance at Constantinople. The
Russians, therefore, have no ships; or, if by chance they have any, what does that signify
to the Turks, since there is no communication between the Baltic and the Archipelago?
The Danes, the Swedes, whose flags are known to the Turks, could not overturn that
argument in their minds; maps spread out before their eyes had no more effect; and the
Divan was not yet persuaded of the possibility of the fact when they received intelligence
of the siege of Coron, the invasion of the Mores, and of the appearance of twelve of the
enemy's line-of-batt!e ships’ (dc Tott, Baron: Memoirs on the Turks and the Tartars,
English translation (London 1785, Jarvis, 2 volsj, vol. ii, pp. 14-15). .

J Clot-Bey, A. B.: Aptrfu Central sur VEgypte (Paris 1840, Fortin ct Masson,
2 vols.), vol. ii, p. 163.

* Sec the passage quoted in IV. iv. 458-60 from Shaykh Abd-ar-RahmSn al-

Jabartl: 'Ajd'ib-al-Athar fi’t-Tardjim uaT-Akhbdr. .....

* See Clot-Bey, op. tit., vol. ii, p. 164. 6 See III. ui. 48.

B 2408 .vui

234 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
vassals. Yet Muscovy had now signally defeated the Ottoman Empire in
the field by means of a borrowed Frankish military technique. In fact,
this Russian victory over Ottoman arms was a Frankish victory at
second-hand; and, to produce such an effective result through such an
incompetent agency, Frankish military methods must be potent indeed.
By starting this train of thought in dismayed Ottoman minds, the
victorious Empress Catherine II prepared the ground in Turkey for the
military reforms of Sultan Selim III, while in Egypt a victorious
Napoleon was in the same sense the forerunner of Mehmed ‘All . 1

In the Ottoman World at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, as in the Russian World at the turn of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the aftermath of defeat by a Modern Western war-
machine was a Westernizing movement from above downwards, begin¬
ning with a remodelling of the armed forces.

‘Ce ne sont jamais les peuples qui font les civilisations, ce sont de
grandes individuality qui les imposent presque toujours par la lutte et
par la violence',

wrote Clot Bey , 2 the French physician whom Mehmed ‘All took into
his service in a.d. 1825 with a mandate to make provision on Western
lines for the health of the Pasha of Egypt’s new Westernized army ; 2 and,
though a generalization from Mehmed ‘All's career does not hold good
for all the instances of Westernizing revolutions within an historian’s
purview, the French director of Mehmed 'All’s military medical sendee
was entirely correct in declaring in a.d. 1840:

‘C’est l’armde et les nombreux appendices qui s’y rattachent qui ont
dom \6 h l’figypte l’impulsion civilisatrice qui l'entrainc aujourd’hui . . . 4
Tout dtait a fairc, et tout a commencd h litre fait h la suite de I’organisation
militaire.’*

In the Ottoman Empire, as in Russia, this Westernization from above
and from a military point of departure cast military officers for the role of
liberal revolutionaries. The successful revolt of the ‘Young 'Osmanli'
Committee of Union and Progress in a.d. 1908 against the autocracy
of Sultan 'Abd-al-Hamid II is the counterpart, in point of personnel, of
the abortive revolt of the Decembrists against the autocracy of Tsar
Nicholas I in a.d. 1S25. The leaders of the Decembrists were mostly
Guards officers, 6 recruited from the Russian nobility, 7 who had served

1 See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii. p. 165. * Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 167.

5 Sec Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 369-70.

♦ Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 167.

» Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii,Jp. J99; cp. p. 200. Sir John Bowring expresses an iden¬
tical opinion in his Report on Egypt and Candia (London 1840, Clowes), p. 49.

6 In thus once again attempting to play a dominant and decisive role in Petrine
Russia*8 political life, the officers of the Imperial Guard were not, in a.d. 1823, taking
a new departure. 'For exactly a hundred year* from Peter's death’ in a.d. 1725, the
Guards had 'decided either the accession or the maintenance on the throne of every
empress or emperor’ (Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence oj Russia (London

7 See Le Monde Slave, Nouvelle Sdrie, 2me Annde, No. 12, Dcccmbre,^i 925 *(Paris
1923. Alcan): ‘Ccntcnaire des Ddcabristes’ p. 334, Paul Pestel, the leader of the moder¬
ate Southern Group, was a free-thinking Protestant of German origin, whose mother
had lived at the Saxon Court at Dresden (ibid., pp. 360, 369, and 370).

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 235
in the Russian army of occupation in France after the overthrow of
Napoleon 1 and were impressed, not so much by the legend of the
French Revolution, as by the constitutional monarchy which had been
inaugurated under their eyes in a post-Napoleonic France. 1 The ring¬
leaders in the ‘Young ‘Osmanli’ revolution of a.d. 1908 were likewise
mostly military officers 3 who—in a generation which ‘Abd-al-Hamld’s
censorship had done its worst to starve of Western intellectual food for
fear of this infecting them with ‘dangerous thought’—had enjoyed almost
a monopoly of licensed access to contemporary Western sources of know¬
ledge and inspiration, because even an ‘Abd-al-Hamid had perceived
that without Western-educated officers he could not have a Westernized
army, and that without a Westernized army he would soon find himself
an autocrat without an empire.

No doubt the tyrant’s intention was that the Western studies of his
military cadets should be strictly confined to technical military manuals,
but it proved beyond the wit of a secret police to ensure that intelligent
and idealistic-minded young men should pick nothing but this stony
fruit from the tree of Modern Western knowledge when a wicket-gate
into a Western intellectual paradise had once been opened to them. 4 A
twentieth-century Ottoman, like a nineteenth-century Russian, auto¬
cracy was indeed in a dilemma from which it could not escape. If it was
to insure itself against a danger of being conquered by militarily efficient
neighbours, it must win military efficiency for itself by providing itself

1950, English Universities Press), p. 137; cp. eundem: Peter the Great end the Ottoman
Empire (Oxford 1949, Blackwell), p. 9). The two new phenomena in a.d. 1825, were, first,
that on this occasion the Russian Imperial Guard—duly keeping abreast of the movement
of Western political ideas—were taking action on behalf, no longer of enlightened auto¬
cracy, but of parliamentary constitutional monarchy (see p. 551, n. 3, below), and, second,
that this time—for the first time in a hundred years—their intervention in politics was
unsuccessful. From first to last, Peter’s new-rr.odel Imperial Guard had been the spear¬
head of the Westernization movement in Russia which Peter had inaugurated.

‘The Guards were drawn from the landowning families, but they served for life and
had been brought up in the full spate of Peter’s reforms. They had grown to manhood
unhabituated to the traditional Muscovite ways, and were, for the most part, ardent sup¬
porters and admirers of their creator . . . Peter used the Guards more and more fre¬
quently on all manner of extraordinary, non-military missions, notably to bring to book
those in high authority.... In the latter part of the reign . . . [they] became something
like misii dominici. . . . Their official appellation, "compellcrs", speaks volumes. In
earlier years Peter used them in the Army to compel other troops to discipline; now in
his closing years he used them in government to compel authorities, high and low alike,
to behave themselves and cany out the law. They were, as it were, a personal extension
of Peter’s own thunderclap will’ (Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of Ruuia,
pp. 36-71).

1 Sec Masaryk, T. G.: The Spirit of Russia , English translation (London 1919, Allen
and Unwin, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 97. The political education of at least two officers of the
younger generation who played leading parts in the Turkish Revolution of A.D. 1908—
Enver Bey and Fethi Bey Okyar—was likewise completed by a period of service in the
Western World; but in both these Turkish military careers the sojourn in the West
came after, not before, the revolution at home. Enver served as Turkish military attachd
in Berlin between the revolution of a.d. 1908 and the suppression of the counter¬
revolution of a.d. 1909; Fethi served in a.d. 1909 as Turkish military attach* in Paris.

j See Le Monde Slave, loc. cit., pp. 378-9.

» Among these, Enver and Jemal won immediate celebrity, but Mustafa Kemal and
Fethi lived to eam a deservedly greater reputation as leaders of the far more fruitful
Turkish national movement of a.d. 1919, while the brain of the conspiracy that came to
a head in a.d. 1908 was not a soldier at all but was the Salonican telegraph clerk Tal'at.

* Muslim ‘Osmanlis had begun to read Western newspapers since the morrow” of the
Great Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74 (Jorga, N.: Geschichle det Osmaniscken
Reiches (Gotha 1908-13, Perthes, 5 vols.), vol. v, p. 44).

236 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
with fighting forces on the Modern Western pattern; but it could not do
this without exposing itself to the alternative danger of being destroyed,
not by foreign conquest, but by domestic revolution, through the recep¬
tion of subversive Western political ideas by the professionally Westem-
trained military officers on whose technical proficiency the military
quality of the autocracy’s fighting forces depended. This dilemma
explains the emergence, in both Russian and Ottoman history, of a
characteristic figure—the liberal revolutionary military officer—which
was a natural phenomenon in a social no-man’s-land between two con¬
flicting cultures, however paradoxical it might appear to be in Western
eyes accustomed to a middle-class social order in which ‘Liberalism’ and
‘Militarism’ were mutually exclusive conceptions.

Up to this point we have been noticing similarities in the courses
taken by the Westernizing movement on Islamic and on Russian ground;
but there was at least one point of capital importance in which the two
movements differed sharply. Peter the Great divined, with the in¬
sight of genius, that a policy of Westernization must be ‘all or nothing’.
He saw that, in order to make a success of it, he must press on without a
pause when once he had embarked on it, and must apply it to all depart¬
ments of life, whatever his particular starting-point might have been.
Accordingly Peter—setting out, like his Ottoman counterparts, from a
military point of departure, and being prompted in the first instance, as
they were prompted, by the motive of self-preservation—never thought
of coming to a halt at the limits of the military sphere (if any such limits
could be drawn in the internal economy of a society which, in seeking
to Westernize its fighting forces, was seeking by definition to equip them
with technical resources of civilian provenance). Peter forged straight
ahead from his narrower towards his wider objective; 1 and, though, as
we have seen, 2 the Petrine regime in Russia never succeeded in Western¬
izing more than the urban superstructure of life and ultimately paid the
penalty for its failure to leaven the rural mass 3 by forfeiting its mandate
to Communism, this arrest of its cultural offensive short of its compre- •
hensive goal was due perhaps not so much to failure of vision or to
inadequacy of agenda as to lack of sufficient driving-power. In Turkey,
on the other hand, for a century and a half, from the outbreak of the
Great Russo-Turkish War in a.d. 1768 till after the close of the First
World War in a.d. 1918, the converts a contre cceur to a policy of
Westernizing the Ottoman fighting forces continued, in despite of
successive painful exposures or their fallacy, to hug the illusion that, in

« See p. 138. above. . . * On p. 140, above.

» Peter’s 'efforts to improve agriculture were intermittent, sporadic and ineffectual
(Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia, p. 161), though agriculture was
the almost exclusive source of Petrine Russia’s wealth, on which such heavy new calls
were being made by the high-speed Westernization of the fighting forces, administra¬
tion, and industry. Moreover, ’so far from attempting to alter serfdom as the basis of
the state, Peter clamped it down more firmly on the peasantry' (ibid., p. 151; cp- PP-
157-8). In consequence, the Russian peasantry never came to feel that the Russian State
was their affair (sec Weidld, W.: La Russie Absents et Present* (Paris 1949, Gallimard),
pp. 163-4); and, though, in the last days of the Petrine regime, the peasantry was
courted belatedly by the governing class and its agents as well as by the Intelligentsia—
Rasputin, as well as Tolstoy, went into peasant dress—the peasantry rejected im¬
partially both the Petrine governing class and an Intelligentsia which had been moved to
secede from it by a sentimental cult of ’the People’ (sec ibid., pp. 110-12 and 183-4).

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 237

adopting elements from an alien culture, it was possible to pick and
choose—as though a culture were not an organic way of life which must
be taken or left as a whole. 1

During that century and a half the prevalent ideal in Ottoman hearts
was to adopt the alien culture of the Modern Western World to the
minimum extent required for immediate self-preservation, and it took
Ottoman minds five generations to learn that the practicable minimum
was nothing less than the ideal maximum. The judgement on all the
successive doses of Westernization that the 'Osmanlis administered to
themselves, with wry faces, in the course of that age of their history is the
damning verdict: 'Each time too little and too late’; 2 and this verdict
is said to have been pronounced by the post-Mahmudian ‘Osmanli
reformer-statesman Mustafa Mehmed Reshid Pasha (vivebat a.d.
i8o2(?)-58), at the beginning of his career, in the following words:

‘Le malhcur, e’est qu’il faut nous hater, et qui ne connait l’indolence
du Musulman et ses insurmontables pr6jugcs! Indolence et pr£jug£s,
voil& nos plus grands ennemis. Ce sont eux qui arrfitent notre marche, et
nous devrions count.’ 1

It was not till a.d. 1919, when this persistent impolicy threatened to
deprive the Ottoman Turks of their Turkish homeland, after having
already lost them their non-Turkish subject territories, that Mustafa
Kemal and his companions committed themselves and their countrymen
unreservedly to the policy of whole-hearted Westernization on which
Peter the Great had launched out unhesitatingly as soon as he had
become master of Russia's destinies.

This long-pursued Ottoman practice of ‘staggering’ the process of
Westernization, which cost the ‘Osmanlis so dear before they eventually
threw it over, was the reflexion of a negative inertia and repugnance
rather than the expression of any positive policy. At the same time the
tragedy of the Ottoman Sultan Selim III and the tragi-comedy of the
Afghan King Am§nall 5 h suggest that the Islamic Westernizers might
have run the risk of bringing on themselves other serious setbacks if
they had been quicker to abandon the tactics of 'hastening slowly’ along
a treacherous westward road. While a Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk found
himself strong enough, in the fifth generation of an Ottoman Westerniz¬
ing movement, to venture deliberately to flout Islamic custom by tearing
the veils off Muslim women’s faces and compelling the men to wear hats
with brims in which it was impossible for them to perform their prayer-
drill, 4 his Ottoman predecessor and his Afghan contemporary both came
to grief through attempting, in the first generation, to emulate the
calculated provocativeness of Peter the Great. When Peter inaugurated
his Westernization campaign by shaving Muscovite beards, this psycho¬
logical Blitzkrieg justified its audacity by breaking the spirit of the
conservative opposition without giving them time to go into action

» On this question see pp. 542-64. below.

» Sec II. ii. 186-7 »nd III- iti. 47- . _

3 Reshid Pasha, as quoted by Engclhardt, E.: La Turquie et le Tanzlmdt (Pans 1882-
4, Cotillon [et Pichon, succcsseur], 2 vols.), vol. ii, p. 3 2 S-
* See V. vi. 102-3.

238 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
against the impious futurist innovator. But, when Selim III put his
new model army into uniforms in the Western style, and when Amanallah
brought back from London 1,001 ready-made suits of Western civilian
clothes and clad in these the 1,001 members of a Great National
Assembly (Lee Jirga) of conservative-minded Afghan tribal notables in
October 1928,’ the Afghan imitator of Peter paid for his audacity with his
throne, 2 and the ‘Osmanli with his life.

In the Ottoman World down to the time of writing, a still unconcluded
drama of Westernization had so far run through four acts. The first act
was the abortive attempt to Westernize the Ottoman fighting forces
that was made by Sultan Selim III (imperabat a.d. 1789-1807). The
second act was an abortive attempt to instil a tincture of Western
Civilization into Ottoman civil life as a corollary of the successful
Westernization of the fighting forces in Turkey by Sultan Mahmud II
(imperabat a.d. 1808-39) an< * * n Egypt by Mehmed ‘All (proconsulari
munere fungebatur a.d. 1805-49). Both these two great Ottoman Turkish
Westernizers performed wonders, yet the impetus that they gave to an
Ottoman Westernizing movement did not outlive its authors for longer
than a single generation, and the subsequent collapse of their work was
due, not solely to the incapacity of their epigoni, but also to an inherent
weakness in the work itself; for, though Mahmud, as well as Mehmed
‘All, had perceived that it was impossible to Westernize his fighting
forces effectively without setting them in a Westernized framework of
civilian life, not even Mehmed 'All had carried this ancillary process of
Westernization in the civilian sphere deep enough, or far enough afield,
to provide sufficiently solid civilian foundations for an ambitious military
superstructure, and the eventual result of this discrepancy was a
financial, military, and political collapse which overtook Turkey and
Egypt simultaneously at the turn of the eighth and ninth decades of the
nineteenth century. In Turkey this unhappy ending of the second
act was followed by the opening of a third act in a.d. 1908, when the
Committee of Union and Progress was brought into power by a military
revolution which compelled Sultan ‘Abd-al-Hamld II to reinstate the
constitution which he had accepted on the 23rd December, 1876, and
suspended on the 14th February, 1878. This third act, in its turn, ended
disastrously for Turkey in seven years of war (a.d. 1911-18) which left her
not only militarily prostrate but actually in danger of political annihila¬
tion. Yet a situation which might have been the end of the play was
followed, after all, by a fourth act, opening in a.d. 1919, in which the
Ottoman Turkish people, under the leadership of Ghazi Mustafa Kcmal,
abandoned the now hopeless task of saving the Ottoman Empire in
order to concentrate their efforts on the new objective of salvaging out of
the wreckage a Turkish nation-state whose survival was to be ensured by
a radical reconstruction on a Western basis. At the time of writing,
this notable enterprise had been carried successfully through its first
stage.

1 See Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey 0] International Affairs, 1928
(London 1929, Milford), p. 205.

* For Amanallah’* career, see V. v. 333 and V. vi. 234.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 239

The Salvaging of an Ottoman Society by Selim III, Mehmed ‘Alt, and
Mahmud II

Selim Ill’s pioneer adventure in the Westernization of Turkey had an
ominous overture in Krim Tatary during the brief interval of nine years
between the renunciation of Ottoman suzerainty over the Khanate in the
Russo-Turkish Peace Treaty of Kuchiik Qaynarja ( pactum a.d. 1774)'
and the annexation of the Khanate by Russia in a.d. 1783. Khan Shahln
Giray ( regebat a.d. 1777-83), finding himself left at the mercy of a
victorious Russian Empire that was his immediate neighbour, was
quicker than his ex-suzerain the Porte to discern, and act upon, the
signs of the times. He set himself forthwith to Westernize his army; but,
before this pathetic attempt to retrieve a desperate situation was crushed
by Russia’s heavy hand, it had evoked a reactionary domestic insurrec¬
tion and had burdened the Khanate with a crushing load of national
debt—two portents of troubles that were to overtake Turkey likewise in
her subsequent pilgrimage towards the same Western goal. 2

In Turkey, Western military experts were employed by the Porte in
the war with the Hapsburg Monarchy and Russia that broke out in a.d.
1788 ; J but the first comprehensive attempt to remodel the Ottoman
army and navy was not made till after the accession of Selim III in
a.d. 1789 and the restoration of peace in a.d. 1792. The Ottoman Navy
was reorganized by French hands; Selim’s new-model army, the Nizam-
i-Jcdid, was inaugurated in 1793. 4 The tragic end of this enlightened
experiment demonstrated that, in the political strategy of military
Westernization in the Ottoman World, an indispensable opening move
was to get rid of the classical regular army represented in Turkey by the
Padishah’s Slave-Household and in Egypt by the Mamluks; for, while,
by Selim Ill’s day, more than a century had passed since a Janissary
Corps which had once been the best infantry in the World had ceased
to be of any avail in war against the Ottoman Empire’s foreign enemies,
the reformer-sultan’s fate showed that the Janissaries still held their own
sovereign’s life in their hands and that the living generation had no more
scruple than their seventeenth-century predecessors had had against
murdering a Padishah when his policy seemed to them to threaten their
vested interests.

In the next act of the Ottoman drama, this lesson was taken to heart
by Selim Ill’s cousin and all but immediate successor, Mahmud II, and
in Egypt by Mehmed ‘AH. Mahmud managed to extirpate the Janissaries
in a . d . 1826, eighteen years after he had been placed on his perilous
throne, 5 and Mehmed 'All the Egyptian Mamluks in a.d. 1811, six years
after he had contrived to be appointed Pasha of Egypt, 6 as Peter had

* The eventual frustration of a sly Ottoman attempt to reacquire this suzerainty by
reserving the Sultan’s jurisdiction over the Crimea in his capacity as Caliph has been
noticed in VI. vii. 23, with n. 4.

* See Jorga, N.: Geichichle del OsmartischenReiches (Gotha 1908-13, Perthes, 5 vols.),

240 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
extirpated the Streltsy 1 in a.d. 1698-9, 2 ten years after his own advent to
effective power; and, while Mehmcd ‘AH did not have to exercise such
patience as Mahmud in waiting for his opportunity to put his drones to
death, he did show extreme caution and tact in taking the steps by which
he gradually built up a counterpart in Egypt of Selim Ill’s abortive
Niz 3 m-i-Jedid.

By the time of his elevation to the viceroyalty of Egypt in a.d. 1805,
Mehmed ‘AH was in a position to profit by Egyptian experience during
the four years that had passed since his second appearance on the scene
in a.d. 1801 as an officer in the Ottoman expeditionary force which had
arrived in Egypt in that year. 3 The French Army that had conquered
Egypt in a.d. 1798 and occupied it thereafter during the years a.d. 1798-
1801 had made a still deeper impression on the Muslim soldiers who had
encountered them than had been made on the Porte by the Western-
trained Russian army and navy that had defeated the Ottoman fighting
forces in a.d. 1768-74. Even the Mamluks, in their lair in Upper Egypt,
had attempted to driU their troops French-fashion; 4 the Mamluk war¬
lord Husayn Bey al-Afranji went so far as to raise a troop of Egyptian
Christian soldiers, with French drums to keep them in step; 3 and
Muhammad al-Alfi likewise had a unit of French-drilled troops, whose
evolutions Mehmed ‘AH used, in a.d, 1806, to watch through field
glasses. 6 The classically educated and conservative-minded qul Khosrev

1 "The Streltsy, part palace guard, part standing army and police force, organised
in twenty-two regiments, each about a thousand strong, and stationed mainly in Mos¬
cow. were more addicted to armed outbursts than fitted for serious military operation*.
... They were a hereditary, privileged force, recruited for the most part from the towns¬
folk, partly engaged in trade and handicrafts, living apart in their own quarters, an in-
citable hotbed of superstition, pride, reaction, and religious dissent' (Sumner: Peter the
Great and the Emergence ojPussia, p. it).

* See III. iii. 282, n. 1. While Peter had been absent from Russia on his Western tour
of a.d. 1697-8, the Streltsy had tried to play the same trick as the Janissaries succeeded
in playing on Selim III. Deserters from the Streltsy regiments stationed in the provinces
had marched on Moscow with the programme of wiping out Peter's German partisans
and dethroning the Tsar in favour of his elder sister Sophia, who had been in power as
regent between the anti-Petrinc revolution of May 1682 (when Peter’s adherents had
once already been massacred) and the pro-Petrine revolution of A.D. 1689. This Putsch
was crushed by Peter’s Scottish right-hand-man Gordon before Peter had had time to
return to Moscow from Vienna, where the news of the revolt had found him. On his
return he took savage punitive measures against the rebels; the Streltsy Corps itself was
disbanded; and the survivors were forbidden to bear arms (sec BriSckner, A.: Peter der
Grosse (Berlin 1879, Grote), pp. 257-66). While Peter was justified, from his own stand¬
point, in destroying a long since useless corps which had tried to deprive him of his
throne and would not have hesitated to take his life, the Streltsy, on their side, had had
grounds for mistrusting Peter’s intentions towards them. Between his effective advent
to power in a.d. 1689 and his two campaigns against the Ottoman fortress of Azov, he
had advertised their incompetence by pitting them against his new Western-trained
regiments in manoeuvres (BrOckner, op. cit., p. no); he was suspect of having used the
two Azov campaigns of A.D. 1695 and A.D. 1696 as opportunities for decimating them
(BrOckner, op. cit., p. 252), a* the Ottoman statesmen of the House of KbprtllO had been
suspected of prolonging the War of Candia in order to reduce the numbers of the Janis¬
saries (sec III. iii. 49, n. 4); and, on the eve of his departure from Russia in A.D. 1697,
he had banished them from Moscow (BrOckner, op. cit., p. 249).

J Mehmed ‘AH had volunteered for service in Egypt in A.D. 1798, and had duly
served in the first Turkish expeditionary force that had suffered disaster at Aboukir
on the 25th July, 1799.

* See Jabarti,Shaykh’Abd-ar-Rahmanal -:' Aja'ib-al-Athdrfi’t-Tarujimxva'l-Akhbar,
French translation: Mtrveilles Biographizes et Histmiques (Cairo 1888-96, Imprimerie
Nationale; Paris 1888-96, Leroux, 9 vols.), vol. vii, p. 128. Cp. vol. viii, p. 46.

* See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. vii, p. 253.

6 See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. viii, p. 46.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 241
Pasha, who was the first viceroy of Egypt under the restored Ottoman
regime after the capitulation of the French in a.d. 1801, set to work next
year to provide himself with the rudiments of a Niz 5 m-i-Jedid by re¬
cruiting Sudanese pilgrims en route through Egypt; dressing these in
uniforms of a French cut; requisitioning black slaves from private
owners; giving these, too, a military training; and also requisitioning
white slaves, whom he equipped like Mamluks but placed under the
command of French officers with a stiffening in the ranks of as many
French deserters as he could enlist. 1 This experiment had as unhappy an
ending as Khosrcv’s master Sultan Selim Ill’s; for, when Khosrev led his
new-model army against the unpaid and consequently mutinous Albanian
mercenary troops of the Ottoman army of reoccupation, he not only failed
to dislodge the mutineers from the citadel of Cairo, but was driven by them
out of the capital and barely succeeded in escaping from Egypt alive. 2

These turbulent Albanian barbarians, who had arrived in Egypt in the
Ottoman expeditionary force of a.d. 1801 with Mehmed 'All as their
second in command, 3 required more delicate handling than the degener¬
ate Egyptian Mamluks and Janissaries. 4 * In a.d. 1806 Mehmed ‘All had
to quell a mutiny of Albanian troops to whom he owed arrears of pay.*
In a.d. 1813 he ventured with impunity to impose a fatigue of Western
drill, twice a week, on the expeditionary force that was at that time in
training for an assault upon the Wahhabis in the Hijaz; 6 but a more
systematic attempt that he made in a.d. 1815 to impose not only Western
drill but also Western uniforms on his Albanian and Turkish troops
provoked a mutiny at Cairo 7 in the spirit of the tmeutes against Khan
Shaliln Gir 3 y and Sultan Selim; Mehmed 'All could count himself
fortunate in managing to bribe the mutineers into a return to discipline 8
before he had suffered Selim’s fate; and this lesson taught the canny
Rumeliot to outmanceuvrc his wild men instead of hazarding a second
frontal attack on their susceptibilities.

1 See Jnbarti, op. cit., vol. vii, p. na.

1 See Jabarti, op. cit., vo!. vii, pp. 163 and 167. The Albanian mutineers pillaged
Khosrev Pasha’s house in Cairo, but the Pasha's harem was defended by eighteen French
soldiers in his service, who kept the mutineers out till all the women had been evacuated
(ibid., p. 166).

J Their commander, Tahir, was not only an Albanian himself but had little or no
command of any language except his Albanian mother tongue. He frequented the
[?Bektashi] dervishes in Cairo and attended their religious exercises (Jabarti, op. cit.,
vol. vii, p. iSt). A few weeks after he had driven Khosrev Pasha out of Cairo and out of
Egypt, Tahir met his death in a clash between his Albanians and the Egyptian Janis¬
saries, and this left the way clear for his second-in-command, Mehmed ‘Ali, to make
himself absolute master of Egypt in the course of the twenty years a.d. 1803-23 by suc¬
cessively playing off the Mamluks against the Janissaries, the 'Ulamfi against the Delis,
and finally Joseph Sive’s French-trained Sudanese regular troops against the Albanians.

* The Egyptian Janissaries were so degenerate by this date that Mehmed ‘Ali did not
find it necessary to pay them the left-handed compliment of massacring them. Their
spirit had already been broken by the humiliation of falling under the ascendancy of the
Mamluks whom it was their hereditary duty to hold in check (sec IV. iv. 453-4).

s See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. viii, pp. 17-18.

* See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, p. 11. The local representatives of the Western Powers
were invited to watch these manoeuvres (ibid., p. 29).

7 See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, pp. 122-31; Clot-Bey, A. B.: Aperfu CMral sur VEgypte
(Paris 1840, Fortin et Masson, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. Ixvii.

* See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, p. 131. Mehmed ‘Ali did succeed in the same year in
persuading the commander and the rank-and-file of one regiment of Delis to wear the
new Western uniforms (Jabarti, op. cit., vol. cit., p. 132).

z 4 2 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

In a.d. 1819 Mehmcd ‘All hired an unemployed Napoleonic French
soldier, Joseph S6vc; posted him at Asw 5 n, at the southern extremity of
Upper Egypt, out of the Albanians’ sight and mind; 1 set him to work
there on giving one thousand recruits a three years’ training; 1 persuaded
him to become a nominal convert to Islam under the name of Suleyman; 3
took a leaf out of his own unfortunate predecessor Khosrev Pasha’s book
by going on, between January, 1823, and June, 1824, to furnish Sive with
thirty thousand Sudanese negro slave-recruits who had been captured
in the campaigns of conquest in the Upper Basin of the Nile that had
been started in a.d. 1820; 4 and then gradually replaced these black
troops by still more docile and far less expensive Egyptian peasant
conscripts. 5 Pari passu with the formation of this new-model army in the
Western style, Mehmcd ‘Ali disbanded his dangerous Albanian and
Turkish irregular troops by such gradual stages that their sting was
drawn before their eyes were opened to the ruse that the Pasha had been
playing on them. 6

Correspondingly acute difficulties were encountered and overcome by
Sultan Mahmud II in building up his new-model army in Turkey—an

1 Sec Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. Ixviii.

* See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 202. The core of this new-mode! army wasa body of
three or four hundred young Mamluks who had saved their lives by capitulating and
becoming Mehmcd ‘All's property (Vingtrinicr, A.: SoKman-Ptuha (Paris 1886, Firmin-
Didot), p. 101). Sive succeeded in disciplining these turbulent and murderous troops by
winning their devotion through showing himself completely fearless in face of an attempt
to take his life on the parade-ground (ibid., pp. 102-4; Bowring, J.: Report on Egypt and
Candia (London 1840, Clowes), p. 50). These reclaimed MamlQks provided a corps of
officers for the new-model army when the rank-and-file was expanded by drafts of
Sudanese negro slave-recruit* and Egyptian peasant conscript* (Clot-Bey, op. cit.,
vol. ii, p. 203).

* Sec Vingtrinicr, op. cit., p. 105. Clot-Bey distinguished himself by refusing to
apostatize (ibid., p. 105).

4 See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 203; Vingtrinicr, op. cit., pp. x 14 and 117.

* See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 204, and also Bowring, J.: Report on Egypt and
Candia (London 1840, Clowes), p. 49, with the story, ibid., p. 50, of Colonel Sivc’s
handling of his three hundred Maml uka. Mehmed ‘Ali’a original plan had been to
recruit Negro slaves in order to avoid the necessity of conscripting Egyptian peasants,
but this servile military material proved too expensive (Bowring, op. cit., p. 16). These
Sudanese slave-recruits 'were strong and docile enough, submitted patiently to military
discipline, and learnt their drill; but they refused to be kept alive* (Dodwell, H.: The
Founder of Modern Egypt (Cambridge 1931, University Press), p. 64). According to a
dispatch of the 8th February, 1824 (F.O. 78/126) from the British Consul-General in
Ejtyph Henry Salt, cited by Dodwell, op. cit., p. 65, some 20,000 of them were thought
to have been collected and sent up to Aswan by A.D. 1824, but in that year not 3,000
remained alive. It was on the advice of the French Consul-General Drovetti that Mch-
med ‘Ali had recourse to the conscription of Egyptian fall 3 hin as an alternative source
of military man-power (according to Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, p. 82, 7,000 had been
conscripted in a.d. 1S14 for the war against the Wahhabis in the Hijaz). About 30,000
of these conscripts were sent to S*ve at Aswan. ‘Salt, who visited the training camp with
Mehmed 'Ali in 1824, thought the Pasha had reason to be delighted with and proud of
his new army’ (Dodwell, op. cit., p. 65).

1803, was avenged by a successor of Khosrcv's who had been their second-in-command
at that time. In a.d. 1823 six regiments of Mehmcd ‘Ali Pasha’s French-trained Sudan¬
ese regular troops made short work of the Albanian mutineers. After Sive had marched
his twenty-five thousand new-model troops from Aswan to within four leagues of Cairo,
the Albanians submitted to the choice, offered them by Mehmed 'Ali, of either entering
the new regular army or leaving Egypt. The revolt of the Albanians against the employ¬
ment of French officers had been doubly dangerous because it had been accompanied
by a revolt of the fallfihin against conscription; but, after the Albanians’ collapse, the
falluhin, too, became submissive (Vingtrinicr, op. cit., pp. 123 and 127).

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 243
enterprise on which he embarked on the 16th June, 1826, literally on
the morrow of the destruction of the Janissaries. 1 The nucleus of his new
force was provided by remnants of divers corps that had been created or
reorganized on Western lines by Selim III; but the officers of these
corps did not suffice for an expanded army in the Western style, even
when they were reinforced by officers borrowed from Mehmed ‘All
and by a few Western renegade officers for the cavalry, artillery, and
engineers. 2 As for the rank-and-file, it had to be recruited by force in the
teeth of conservative resistance. In Bosnia, Mahmud's local recruiting
officer was mobbed, and the new Western-style uniforms were torn to
pieces. 3 The pressed men had to be brought to barracks in chains and
kept under guard after their arrival. 4 * The least unsatisfactory recruits
were boys from the poorer classes of the Muslim community whose
families had no traditional associations with the Janissaries, s and many
of these boy recruits were not more than thirteen years old. 6 The privates
were quicker in mastering Western drill than the high command was in
mastering the Western art of war. 7

When Mehmed 'All won a free hand, he carried through to completion
his policy of Westernizing his armed forces. Under the general super¬
intendence of Colonel S6ve as Chief of Staff, 8 a training school for
infantry officers, directed by a Piedmontese ci-devant Napoleonic
officer, Bolognini, was opened at Damietta, 9 and an artillery school at
Turah under a Portuguese director, Scguerra. 10 * A regular cavalry force
was not organized till after Mehmed ‘All’s son, Ibrahim Pasha, had seen
the French cavalry in the Morea," when they were replacing his own
troops on the eve of his evacuation, under force majeure , after the des¬
truction of the Egyptian and Turkish fleets at Navarino by a combined
Anglo-Franco-Russian naval force. Thereafter a cavalry school was
opened at Gizah, in a palace formerly belonging to the Mamluk war-lord
Murad Bey, under the direction of a French officer, Varin. 12 In the army
as a whole, the contemporary French military organization was copied
exactly (except that Turkish was retained as the language for the words
of command). 13 The French system of discipline was introduced, and was

1 See Bastelberger, J. M.: Die militdrischtn Ref omen unter Mahmud 11 , dem Reiter

des Oimanuchen Reiehei (Gotha 1874. Perthes), pp. 109 and 128.

* See Bastelberger, op. cit., pp. 127-9. In ‘he artillery the renegades were the only

scientifically trained officers (ibid., p. 142).

> See ibid., pp. 126-7. 4 See ibid., p. 134.

* Sec ibid., pp. 126-7. 6 Sec ibid., pp. 127, » 39 . *nd J73.

’ Sec ibid., pp. 139-40. The new Turkish, like the new Egyptian, army was governed

by the French rigUnunU (ibid., p. 139). * Sec Bowring, op. cit., p. 49.

9 See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 204.

See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 207.

'« Sec Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. Ixxxii, and vol. ii, p. 20s. In the new-mode! Turkish
army the cavalry proved more difficult to train alia Franca than the infantry. The Turks
particularly disliked the Western style of horsemanship. A Westernized Turkish cavalry
was produced in the end thanks to the work of their Western instructors and to the per¬
sonal concern of Sultan Mahmud, who was particularly interested in this arm (Bastcl-
berger, op. cit., pp. 129-30 and 141-2).

,J See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 206; cp. Bowring, op. cit., pp. 52-53. In Ibrihfm
Pasha’s army of occupation in Syria, the cavalry were not so well drilled as the infantry,
according to the British Consul-General in Egypt, Colonel Patrick Campbell, in a report
on Syria in a.d. 1837. printed in J. Bowring's Report on the Commercial Statiitici of
Syria, dated the 17th July, 1839 (London 1840, Clowes), p. 128.

«J See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 208.

244 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
administered according to the French military penal code* (except that
the traditional Egyptian punishment of the bastinado was not abolished ). 1

The Egyptian new-model army was also made to march to French
military music; 3 but in the psychologically significant and politically
delicate matter of military dress Mchmed ‘All—taught by his unfortu¬
nate experience in a.d. 1815 4 —showed more prudence than Sultan
Mahmud II in making a judicious compromise. Mahmud put his new-
model army into a completely Western military costume from the neck
downwards, and thereby brought into odium his entire programme of
reform by identifying it in Muslim minds with hateful Western clothes 5

1 A new-model navy was created for Mchmed 'Alt by French naval officers on parallel
lines:

‘The naval code adopted in Egypt is that of France, whose introduction must be
traced to the number of French sea-officers who have entered the Egyptian Navy, and
many of them obtained elevated command. Very essential services have indeed been
rendered to the Egyptian Marine by French naval officers, especially by Ccrisy Bey,
who had for many years charge of the arsenal at Alexandria, and Besson Bey, who was
second in command in the Fleet’ (Bowring, J.: Report on Egypt and Candia, dated the
27th March, 1839 (London 1840, Clowes), p. 54).

Mehmed ‘Ali’s first-hand observation of the potency of sea-power in the campaigns
in and around Egypt during the years a.d. 1799-1807 had made him alive to the value of
a navy in the Modem Western style for a nineteenth-century ruler of Egypt, and he
started work on building one up for himself in A.D. 1808, immediately after his repulse
of the British invasion of Egypt in A.D. 1807 and seven years before his abortive first
attempt in a.d. 1815-16 to create a new-model army. After buying Western warships
at second hand, Mehmed ’Ali obtained in a.d. 182; the French Government’s permission
to have two frigates and one brig built for him at Marseilles (Dodwell, op. cit., pp. 66
and 223). ‘A little later he made a dock at Alexandria and began to build on his own
account, employing French shipwrights to control the work’ (ibid.). His naval dockyard
at Alexandria, on the other hand, was not started till A.D. 1828 (ibid.), when he was be¬
ginning to replace his original Western-model navy which he had lost at Navarino.
A French expert from the naval dockyard at Toulon, Ccrisy, was put in charge of the
dockyard at Alexandria in a.d. 1829 (ibid.). A line-of-battle ship of one hundred guns
was launched on the 3rd January, 1811 (Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 222-5). B Y *•*>•
1833 Mehmed ’Ali had 6 ships of the line, ranging in scale of armament from 84 to 110
guns, and 7 frigates, and, by a.d. 1837, 8 ships of the line, with one more under construc¬
tion. The number of hands employed in the arsenal at Alexandria rose to over 3,000
under the direction of 60 Westerners, and the naval school at Ras-al-Tin had a strength
of 1,200 cadets (Dodwell, op. cit, p. 223). In a.d. 1839 Mehmed ‘Ali’s navy was still
being managed for him by Frenchmen, but Mehmed Bey, who was the controller of the
dockyard at that time, had been educated in England (Bowring; Report on Egypt and
Candia, pp. 33 ~ 34 ).

J See Clot-Bey, op. cit, p. 212; cp. Bowring, op. cit, pp. 52-3.

J See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 81.

* See p. 241, above. In Egypt the style and cut of Frankish military uniforms had
offended the aesthetic susceptibilities, not only of the Rumeliot soldiery who had been
ordered to assume this alien garb, but also of the native Egyptian civilian spectators.
Jabarti, for example, comments (in op. cit., vol. ix, p. 140) on the ugliness of the new
uniforms, and laments, in this context, over the disappearance of a traditional decorum
and good taste.

s In the uniform of Mahmud’s Westernized Turkish Army by a.d. 1839 the loose
native shalwar had been replaced by tight Western pantaloons for all ranks, while the
officers had also been put into Western military frock-coats (Bastelberger, op. cit., pp.
202-3). These affectations drew criticism from Mehmed ‘All’s son and right-hand-man
IbrShim Pasha, who was the leading exponent of the rival Egyptian school of Ottoman
Westemizcrs:

The Porte have taken Civilisation by the wrong side. It is not by giving epaulettes
and tight trousers to a nation that you begin the task of regeneration. Instead of begin¬
ning by their dress—and dress will never make a straight man of one who is lame—
they should endeavour to enlighten the minds of their people. Look at us: we have
schools of every description; we send our young men to be educated in Europe. We are
also Turks, but we defer to the opinions of those who are capable of directing our own,
whereas no regard is paid by the Porte to advice that is not their own. Their men would
make very good soldiers, but their officers ... I The only man they had, capable of con¬
ducting their affairs, is the late Grand Vizier, Reshid Pasha. . . . You see the treatment

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 245
—though, in deference to the sjTnbolic significance with which head-
gear, above all other articles of dress, was traditionally charged in the
Islamic World, he did draw the line at forcing a Western form of military
hat on to his soldiers’ heads. In the army, as in the civil service, Mahmud
effaced former invidious distinctions by replacing the studied diversity
of the traditional Islamic headgear by the egalitarian uniformity of the
non-Western fez , 1 but a hundred more years were to pass before
Mahmud’s successor, Mustafa Kcmal Atatiirk, could venture in Turkey
to impose upon all male Ottoman subjects the brimmed hat which, in
Muslim eyes, was the Frankish gyaour’s characteristic mark of the beast . 1
In the new-model Egyptian army, Mehmed 'All likewise abolished the
turban , 3 and even went to the Petrine length of forbidding the wearing
of beards ; 4 but the uniform which he devised for his troops was modelled,
not on Western military uniforms, but on the more congenial contem-

C orary dress of Rumeliot Turkish Muslim civilians . 3 All the same,
lehmed 'All found it advisable to grant high rates of pay to senior
officers, as an antidote to the repugnance which was aroused in Turkish
souls by even the moderately Western style of the new-model army in
Egypt . 6

In Mahmud’s Turkish army the officers were paid less and the privates
more . 7 In Egypt a Turkish officer enjoyed a rarity value, as the native
Egyptians did not prove to make good officers , 8 while they did provide
an abundant supply of conscript private soldiers. The Egyptian peasant
conscript was perhaps better off in the Army than in his village . 9 The
Egyptian troops were well fed 10 and were pronounced by a Western
observer to fare no worse than their contemporary fellow soldiers in the

which he experienced at their hands’ (Memorandum of M. Alexander Pisani’s report
of his interview with Ibrahim Pasha at Kyutahiyeh, dated the 10th March, 1833 | 7 ), en¬
closed in F.O. 78/209, Canning to Palmerston, [#] 12,7th March, 1832, quoted in Bailey,
F. E.: British Polity and the Turkish Reform Movement, A Study in Anglo-Turkish
Relations, 1826-1853 (Cambridge. Mass. 1942, Harvard University Press), p. 172,
n. 153).

1 The non-Westcm origin of the fez, which was its merit in Muslim eyes, did not
make it a specifically Islamic head-dress. It was an ancient Mediterranean article of
apparel—identical with the Roman freedman’s pilleus—and it had been taken over by
Arabic-speaking Mediterranean Muslims without ever having been abandoned by
Greek-speaking Mediterranean Orthodox Christians.

* Sec p. 237, above, and V. vi. 102-3. Among Egyptian Muslims in Mehmed 'All’s day
the feeling against hats—and especially against hats with brims—was so strong that
the expression ‘I will take the hat’ was used with the meaning 'I will stick at nothing’
(Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. 362).

J The date of this negative revolution in Egyptian military headgear was about A.D.
1823 (Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. 362). A hundred and twenty-four years later, the
turban was still part of the full-dress uniform of the last British officers to serve in Indian
cavalry regiments (see p. 228, n. 2, above).

* See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. 368. Beards were still highly prized by the Egyptian
peasantry, and the story of a peasant conscript’s grievance sgainst a village headman
{shaykh-al-balad) who had caused the conscript’s beard to be shaved will be found ibid.,
p. 369.

J See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. 363. No doubt the moral of an unwillingly con¬
scripted Egyptian fallah-soldier was raised by the exhilarating experience of finding
himself clad in the dress of the imperial people with whom, in civil life, he could never
have ventured to equate himself.

6 Sec Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 211.

1 See Bowring, J. : Report on the Commercial Statistics of Syria, dated the 17th July,
1829 (London 1840, Clowes), p. 27.

■ See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 214.

9 See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. 248.

•o See Clot-Bcv, op. cit., p. 209.

246 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
West; 1 and their behaviour to their civilian fellow Egyptians (though
not their behaviour to the foreign Arabic-speaking civilian population
of Syria) was exemplary by contrast with the excesses of their predeces¬
sors the Mamluks, Janissaries, Dells, and Albanian mercenaries. 2 Broken
in to Western military discipline and led by Rumcliot Turkish and
Albanian commanders, they developed a martial spirit, 3 of which they
gave proof in the Morea in a.d 1825, when they broke the resistance of
insurgent Greek highlanders who were still formidable even after they
had turned their arms against one another, and at Nisib on the 24th
June, 1839, which was perhaps the first occasion since the Battle of
Kadesh (comtnissum circa 1288 b.c.) in which the peasantry' of the Lower
Nile Valley had defeated in the field the peasantry of the Anatolian
Plateau. 4 This military service in Mehmcd ‘All’s army reawakened in
Egyptian souls a national consciousness which had been stifled ever
since the Primitive Arab Muslim conquerors of Egypt in the seventh
century of the Christian Era had snatched out of Egyptian hands the
political fruits of an eight-hundred-years-long Egyptian struggle against
Hellenism. 5

Though Mehmed ‘AH thus gave the first impulse to a latter-day
Egyptian nationalist movement on a Modern Western pattern, 6 and, at
the height of his power in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century,
was in direct or indirect control of all the Arab countries east of Cyrenaica
and west of ‘Iraq and the Hadhramawt, over an area extending from the
Libyan desert to the Persian Gulf, this Rumcliot Turk 7 was neither an

* See Bowring, J.: Report on Egypt and Candia, dated the 27th March, 1839 (London
1840, Clowe*), p. 52.

1 See Dodwcll, op. cit., pp. 22S and 256.

5 See Clot-Bey, op. cit., voL ii, p. 212.

* An afterwards eminent Prussian officer who was a spectator of the Battle of Nisib
from the Turkish side formed a low opinion of both the belligerent armies. ‘Hafiz
Pasha’s army', writes Hellmuth von Moltke {Brie/e Ober Zustdr.de und Begebenheiten in
der TCrkci (Berlin 1841, Mittler), pp. 405-6). ‘was undoubtedly the best trained, best
disciplined and best practised army, and at the same time the army with the worst moral,
that the Porte had ever put into the field.’ In the campaign of a.d. 1829 the Qdniyeh
and Qaysari corps remained passive and thereby allowed IbrShim Pasha to withdraw
his garrisons from Cilicia and concentrate them on the battlefield (ibid., p. 384); and,
immediately after the rout of the Turkish army at Nisib, the retreating Turkish regular
troops were attacked by their Kurdish fellow soldiers (ibid., p. 397), who had been
kidnapped to make good the losses in the Turkish ranks and who had had to be treated
like prisoners of war by their Turkish officers, with whom these non-Turkish-sneaking
recruits were unable to communicate (ibid., pp. 382-3). While the new-model Western-
trained Turkish regulars were melting away, the old-fashioned feudal cavalry ( sipdhls )
held together (ibid., p. 398). The moral of Ibrahim’s Egyptian regulars was equally low
(ibid., p. 283). Two Egyptian battalions deserted to the Turks on the very day of the
Turkish defeat (ibid., p. 398). Nevertheless, Ibrahim won the day—though he could
muster hardly more than half the Turkish army’s strength—thanks to his superiority
in artillery and in ability to manoeuvre (ibid., p. 382).

5 The anti-Macedonian Egyptian nationalist movement of the second century B.c.,
like the anti-Turkish Egyptian nationalist movement of the nineteenth century of the
Christian Era, was brought to life by the military prowess of a native Egyptian new-model
army raised and trained by alien rulers (sec V. v. 68).

6 According to Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 468-9, the Arabs already hated the
Ottoman domination.

’ Mehmcd ‘All was born in a.d. i 769 at Kavila (KafidXa, the phonetic equivalent of the
Attic Greek word xo{>a\f) in the Macedonian dialect of Ancient Greek), the port of the
Eastern Macedonian tobacco-growing plains watered by the lower course of the River
Struma (Strymon) and by its right-bank affluent the Anghista (Angitfis). In the four¬
teenth century of the Christian Era the city of Serrhes (Siris) in the Struma plain had
become a stronghold, first of the Serb and then of the ‘Osmanli conquerors of the

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 247
Egyptian nor a Pan-Arab nationalist; 1 he was an Ottoman patriot whose
ambition was, not to destroy the Ottoman Empire by carving out of its
Arab provinces a successor-state for himself and his heirs, but to re¬
juvenate the Ottoman Empire 2 by a process of Westernization which was
to be achieved through a fruitful marriage of his own genius with the
economic resources of Egypt. If his march on Constantinople had not
been halted by the intervention of Russia in a.d. 1833 and of Russia,
Great Britain, the Hapsburg Monarchy, and Prussia in a.d. 1839, he
might have become the Shogun of a Westernizing Ottoman Empire in
which an efficiently managed Egypt would have served, as it had once
served in Augustus’s Roman Empire, to provide an enlightened dictator
with the material means for carrying out his policy. 3 In an Ottoman
Empire under Mehmed ‘AH’s administration, the rehabilitation of this
derelict cldorado in the Nile Valley might have offset the loss, in a.d.
1774, of a still undeveloped eldorado in the Great Western Bay of the
Eurasian Steppe, as Carthage had been compensated for the loss of her
Sicilian dominion in the First Romano-Carthaginian War by Hamilcar
Barca’s acquisition for her of a greater empire in the Iberian Peninsula.

Unhappily, not only for Mehmed ‘All’s personal ambitions, but for
the interests of the Islamic World, the Rumeliot viceroy of Egypt, like
the Barcide viceroy of Spain, was thwarted by the jealousy of lesser men 4
in the capital of the tottering empire whose fortunes he was effectively
retrieving by constructive labours far afield; and an alliance between
Mehmed ‘All’s personal rivals at Constantinople and a concert of foreign
Powers who had combined to frustrate the Levantine ambitions of his
patroness France proved a more effective force, in the international crisis
of a.d. 1839, than the public feeling in Turkey, and in the Islamic World
at large, in Mehmed ‘All’s favour. 5

derelict European province* of an East Roman Empire that had been shattered by Western
Christian military adventurer* in a.d. 1204. The fertile district* of Serrhe* and Drama
had been planted thickly with 'Osmanli settlers by Sultan MurSd I; and Mehmed ‘Ali,
with his blond hair and beard and light chestnut-coloured eyes (Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol.
i, p. lxxv), might well have been a *cion of this stock, though, according to one account
of his ancestry, hi* family were recent arrivals in Macedonia from Anatolia and were of
Albanian origin. Mehmed 'Ali himself had started life in the local tobacco trade (Clot-
Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. lix) before enlisting as a volunteer in the Ottoman expeditionary
force that was sent to Egypt in a.d. 1799. Mehmed 'Ali'* first wife, who, like her husband,
was a Rumeliot, is said to have influenced him (Bowring, op. cit., p. 148).

1 According to Prokesch-Osten, Count A.: Mehmed Aly, Vixektnig ton Aegypten,
aus meinem Tagtbuche, 1826-1841 (Vienna 1877, Br*umailcr), PP- 62-03, Mehmed 'Ali
did not want to found an Arab empire, though in such an enterprise he would have had
the support of Arab public feeling (cp. Bowring, Report on Eg)pt and Candia , p. 7).

* This is the opinion of A. B. Clot, the French director of Mehmed ‘All’s army
medical service (Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 476), snd also of a contemporary Austrian
diplomatic observer, Count A. Prokesch-Osten (see op. cit., pp. 15 and 120).

3 See pp. 696-8, below.

4 Mehmed 'Ali’s arch-enemies at Constantinople in the crisis of A.D. 1839-41 were
the conservative Grand Vizier Khosrcv Pasha, who was not only opposed on principle
to Mehmed ‘Ali’s policy of Westernization but bore him a personal grudge for his share
in Khosrev’s humiliating expulsion from Egypt in a.d. 1803, and a rival Westernizer in
the person of the French-educated Reslud Pasha, who was transferred from the Otto¬
man Embassy in Paris to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Constantinople on the 24th
January, 1838, by the Khosrcv whom heafterwards supplanted (Prokesch-Osten, op. cit.,
pp. 70 and 134).

5 On this point, Prokesch-Osten’a testimony deserves consideration, though it must
be discounted to some extent in view of this witness’s personal bias as an advocate (op.
cit., p. 105) of the policy of working for a reconciliation between Mehmed ‘Ali and Sultan

248 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
By the fiat of the Powers, Mehmed ‘All was confined, in the settlement
of a.d. 1840-1, to the governorship of the Ottoman possessions in the
Nile Valley; 1 yet, though the Ottoman World was thus disappointed of
its hopes of political reunion under the auspices of a man of genius, it
had at least escaped the complete dissolution that had threatened it in and
after a.d. 1774; 2 and the imposition of peace in a.d. 1840-1 at the cost of
a permanent political division between Turkey and Egypt did relieve the
crushing pressure of an armed truce under which the two Ottoman
Powers had been keeping costly Westernized armies mobilized on a
remote frontier for six years (a.d. 1833-9) since the Turco-Egyptian
War of a.d. 1831-3 . 3 The security of Turkey was increased by the terms
of a protocol of the 13th July, 1841, in which all the Great Powers of the
day agreed with Turkey that the Straits between the Aegean and the
Black Sea should be closed to non-Turkish warships of all flags in peace¬
time. Thereafter, in the Crimean War (gerebatur a.d. 1853-6), Turkey
had France, Great Britain, and Sardinia for her allies, instead of having

Mahmud II’s successor Sultan ‘Abd-al-Mcjid (imprrabat a.d. 1839-61). According
to Prokcsch-Oaten, Mehmed ‘AH was a convinced Muslim (p. 15); he reckoned, in
the crisis of A.D. 1839, that Muslim opinion would rally to his support because he had
shown greater independence than had been shown by the Porte in dealing with the
Franks (p. 80); and the hopes of the Muslim World were in fact centred on him (p. 121).
Whatever may have been the feelings of the Islamic World at large, those of some of his
Turkish fellow countrymen were made manifest in the action of the Turkish fleet, which,
on the outbreak of war, sailed from the Bosphorus to Alexandria and placed itself at
Mehmed 'Ali’s disposal. Prokesch-Osten reports that after the Turkish fleet’s arrival
at Alexandria on the 17th July, 1839, Mehmed 'Ali gave the officers an address in which
his theme was the need for fraternal unity among Muslims and the consequent duty of
loyalty to Sultan 'Abd-al-Mcjid (p. 102). On the same occasion he is said to have ex-

S ressed a wish to come to Constantinople in order to reorganize the Ottoman Empire
>. 103). On the evidence of the same authority, Turkish public opinion in Constanti¬
nople in A.D. 1839 was overwhelmingly on the side of Mehmed 'Ali and against his ad¬
versary- the Grand Vizier Khosrev; and the partisans of the Viceroy of Egypt included
the Sultan’s mother (pp. iu-ia). When Khosrev appealed for a second time to the
Powers, other Turkish grandees were moved to indignation (pp. 117 and 119).

1 The P&dishah’s two firmans of the 13th February, 1841, conferred the Pashalyq
of Egypt on Mehmed 'Ali and his heirs (on terms that were strictly defined), and the
governorship of Mehmed 'Ali’s own conquests in the Sudan on Mehmed 'Ali himself
for life.

* It has already been noticed, on pp. 230-41, above, that the portions of Dfir-al-IslSm
that had come under non-Muslim rule between A.D. 1774 and A.D. 1952 were a remark¬
ably small fraction of the whole. The immediate threat to the Ottoman Empire's exis¬
tence on the morrow of the signature of the Russo-Turkish peace treaty of KtlchQk
Qaynarja came from the pullulation of incipient parochial successor-states; and, among
these, the states set up by militant outlying barbarians, such as the Montenegrins, the
Serbs of the Shumadiya, the Maniots, the Kurds, and the Wahhabis, were less menacing
than those set up in the metropolitan provinces by insubordinate Ottoman Muslim
war-lords such as Pasvanoghlu of Viddin and 'Ali of Yannina in Rumelia, and the Qira
'OsmUnoghlu and a host of lesser derc beys in an Anatolia whose Muslim Turkish

S alation had never quite forgotten the days before the Ottoman conquest of the non-
>man Turkish successor-state* of the Saljuqs (sec II. ii. 150-4). These Ottoman
war-lords built up their power by hiring war-bands of Muslim barbarian mercenaries—
Albanians, Bosniaks, and Maghribis—and they were a greater menace than the recal¬
citrant tribesmen in Rumelia, Arabia, and Kurdistan because there were no national
limits to the war-lords’ capacity for territorial expansion at the expense of the authority
of the Porte. By a.d. 1840-1 these internal dangers had been weathered by the Ottoman
Empire at the cost of having been constrained to recognize the autonomy of Mehmed
'All in the Nile Valley and of a Serbian principality in the Lower Morava Valley and the
independence of a Kingdom of Greece within modest frontiers. The Turkish new-model
army, inefficient though it still was had succeeded in reimposing the Porte’s authority
on the Kurds, while the Wahhabis had been temporarily crushed by Mehmed ‘Ali on
the Porte’s behalf (see IV. iv. 76-78).

J This point is made by Moltke, op. cit., pp. 381 and 401.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 249
to fight Russia again single-handed, and in the ensuing peace-settlcmcnt
of Paris she was formally admitted into the Western comity of nations.

The Collapse in Turkey and Egypt at the Beginning of the Last Quarter of
the Nineteenth Century

Thus the dose of Westernization that had been administered by
Ottoman statesmanship to Turkey and Egypt since a.d. 1774 had
enabled both these Ottoman politics by the middle of the nineteenth
century to surmount the crisis into which the Ottoman World had been
plunged by the Russo-Turkish War that had broken out in a.d. 1768.
Yet, towards the turn of the eighth and ninth decades of the nineteenth
century, both Mahmud II’s Turkey and Mehmed ‘All’s Egypt col¬
lapsed. Why was it that, within twenty years of the signature of the
Peace Treaty of Paris in a.d. 1856, both Turkey and Egypt had fallen
into adversity again ?

One cause of this simultaneous collapse of the two temporarily re¬
juvenated Ottoman Powers was the cumulative effect of a strain imposed
by the maintenance of professional fighting forces on a Western pattern
in a society whose life had not yet been Westernized through and through.
The consequent increase in government expenditure was not balanced
by any increase of a comparable order of magnitude in the national in¬
come through a Westernization of methods of economic production; so
far from that, the productivity of the peasantry was reduced by the
devastating effects on work, health, and morals of the introduction of the
recently invented Modern Western institution of military conscription ; 1
and in Egypt, where Mehmed ‘All had embarked on an ambitious pro¬
gramme of industrial as well as agricultural development that had not
been emulated in Turkey by Sultan Mahmud, a chartered accountant’s
balance sheet would probably have shown that these enterprises were
running at a loss . 2 A growing gap between public expenditure and

» See IV. iv. >50-2.

* Arguments on both sides of the question whether Mehmed 'Ali’s attempt to in¬
dustrialize Egypt was justified economically arc set out by Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii,
pp. 278-9. The adverse judgements in Bowring’s report should perhaps be taken with a
grain of salt in view of Prokesch-Osten’s insinuation (op. cit., pp. 82-83) that the British
did not relish the competition of Egyptian manufactures with theirs in the markets of
the Islamic World. Yet Bowring was probably correct in stating (op. cit., p. 15) that the

S ipulation of Egypt was impoverished by the monopolies through which Mehmed 'Ali’s
ovemment attempted to make its economic enterprises pay their way. He also states
(op. cit., p. 29) that the cotton textile and other Egyptian governmental industries were
compelled to sell their product to the consumer at an unremunerativc price in order to
compete with imported Western goods which were free to enter Egypt subject to pay¬
ment of duty at the rate of 3 per cent, ad valorem (the maximum chargeable under the
current terms of the Ottoman Capitulations). Bowring declares that the effective maxi¬
mum was still lower than this. If Bowring is correct on this point too, that would, of
course, tell against Prokesch-Ostcn’s view that Egyptian industries were regarded, in
British eyes, as a serious menace to British exports. All the same, we know for a fact
that the British Government had in mind Mehmed ’Ali’s policy of state-promoted
industrialization fortified by monopolies when it negotiated with the Porte the Anglo-
Turkish commercial treaty of the 16th August, 1828, in which the maximum of 3 per
cent, ad valorem for Ottoman import duties was confirmed. The terms of this treaty were,
of course, applicable to all Ottoman territories, including Egypt: but the Egyptian,
unlike the Turkish, Government managed to abandon its monopolies in form without
ceasing to enjoy them in effect (see Moseley, P. E.: Russia* Diplomacy and the Opening
of the Eastern Question in 1838 and 1830 (Cambridge, Mast., 1934, Harvard University
Press), p. ior; Bailey, F. E.: British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, A Study in

250 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
revenue was momentarily bridged by the Turkish and Egyptian Govern¬
ments’ fatal discovery of the nineteenth-century Western money market.
Loans contracted, with the light-hearted ness of ignorance, on exorbitant
terms for non-reproductive purposes brought both governments to
bankruptcy within two or three decades.

A second cause of collapse was the burden of holding down territories
in which a majority of the population was disaffected. Turkey had in¬
herited from her own past the problem of Rumclia; she had reimposed
on herself the burden of Ottoman Kurdistan by re-establishing her
authority there in a.d. 1835-50, 1 and the burden of the Asiatic Arab
provinces by suppressing the 'Iraqi Mamluks in a.d. 1831 2 and by avail¬
ing herself of the support of four Great Powers to recover Syria from
Mehmed 'All in a.d. 1840 and the Hijaz in a.d. 1845. As for Mehmed
‘All, he had deliberately saddled Egypt with a new empire which was
as intractable as it was unremunerative by overthrowing the Wahhabi
Power in Arabia in a.d. 1810-18 and embarking on the conquest of the
Sudan in a.d. 1820. Sultan Selim I, the Ottoman conqueror of Syria
and Egypt in the heyday of Ottoman power, had never attempted this
foolhardy feat of launching out on to the Afrasian Steppe; and, though
Egypt was relieved of her Arabian commitment by the revolt of the
Najd circa a.d. 1830 3 and the subsequent re-establishment of Turkey’s
in place of Egypt’s suzerainty over the Hijaz, Mehmed ‘Ali’s successors
at Cairo continued to push their southern and south-western frontiers
forward into the heart of Africa till the Egyptian Government's Silesian
representative Emin Pasha had carried the Egyptian flag to Uganda
in a.d. 1877, four years before the whole house of cards was brought
tumbling down in a.d. 1881-5 by the insurrection of the Sudanese
Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad. 4

The most serious of all these Ottoman problems of disaffected popula¬
tions was Turkey’s problem in Rumelia, where she had to deal, not, like
Egypt in the Sudan, with Nomads and primitive peoples in an outlying
hinterland, but with a subject Orthodox Christian majority geographi¬
cally intermingled with a dominant Turkish minority which had likewise
been at home in Rumelia since the establishment of the Ottoman Empire
in the fourteenth century of the Christian Era.

After the turn of the tide in a.d. 1683 ' n the perennial warfare between
the ‘Osmanlis and the Western Powers, the destinies of the Ottoman
Empire depended above all on the ability of the Turkish ‘ascendancy’ in
Rumclia to conciliate its Orthodox Christian fellow countrymen and
fellow subjects of the Porte. The Orthodox Christian peoples’ greater
dislike for Frankish than for Ottoman rule had made the Ottoman
Empire’s fortune in the days of its rise, 5 and, now that it had passed its
zenith, its decline might at least have been retarded if Ottoman Orthodox

Attglo-Turkish Relations, 1826-18S 3 (Cambridge, Mass., 1942, Harvard University
Press}, p. 124, n. 109).

1 Sec Longricg, S. H.: Four Centuries 0f Modem 'Iraq (Oxford 1925, Clarendon
Press), pp. 284-8.

1 See Loncrigg, op. cit., pp. 250-76.

5 See V. w. 233, with n. 5.

* See V. v. 295, with n. 1.

* See pp. 151-2, above.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 251

Christians could have been induced to join with Ottoman Muslims in a
common anti-Frankish front.

On the morrow of the turn of the tide, the possibility of establishing
some such common front was greater than at any later date, since at that
time the Modern West was only just beginning to exert its attraction on
Ottoman Orthodox Christian souls, 1 and the Grand Vizier Mustafa
Kdprttlu was not slow in seeing and seizing this opportunity. In a.d.
1691, only eight years after the Ottoman retreat from before the walls of
Vienna and three years after the Hapsburg armies’ incursion into
Kosovo, he promulgated the first charter of constitutional rights for the
non-Muslim subjects of the Porte. But the Niz 3 m-i-Jcdid of a . d . 1691
did not go far enough, even on paper, to rally the ra'iyeh with conviction
to the support of their discomfited Ottoman masters, and, even as far
as it went, it remained largely a dead letter owing to a decadent Imperial
Government’s loss of effective control over the provinces. By the time
when that control had been recovered in the course of the reign of Sultan
Mahmud II (imperabat a.d. 1808-39), the price of the ra'iyeh'$ loyalty
to the Porte had risen sharply. By that time the ra'iyeh had become
hardened cultural converts to the secular civilization of the Modern
West; this civilization had given birth to the political ideals of the year
1789; and, in the Western World itself, the unifying ideal of Parliamen¬
tary Democracy had been pressed into the service of the disruptive ideal
of Nationalism. 2

Thus, in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, the political
atmosphere of a Modern Western World into which the ‘Osmanlis as
well as their ra'iyeh were now being irresistibly attracted was less auspi¬
cious than it had been in the seventeenth century for an Ottoman
attempt to win the ra'iyeh 's loyalty. A sincere, enlightened, and energetic
attempt to attain this difficult objective was made, nevertheless, by the
Ottoman ‘ascendancy’ during its years of grace between the settlement
of the Egyptian question in a.d. 1841 and the outbreak, in a . d . 1875, j of
a local revolt of the ra'iyeh in Bosnia which precipitated the break-up of
the Ottoman Empire in Rumelia within the next three years.

The monuments of constructive Ottoman statesmanship during this
critical period are the Westernizing constitutional reforms—known
collectively as the Tanzlmat—which were inaugurated by Sultan ‘Abd-
al-Mejld’s promulgation of the Khatt-i-Sherif-i-Giilkhane on the 3rd
November, 1839, 4 and were crowned by Sultan ‘Abd-al-Hamid II’s
promulgation of a short-lived constitution on the 23rd December, 1876.

» See pp. 161-5. above. * See IV. iv. 156-85.

J The revolt in Bosnia in July 1875 had been preceded by two year* (a.d. 1873-5)
of famine and financial collapse, so that the spell of political fine weather which had
begun in A.D. 1841 virtually came to an end at the death of Melimed Emin ‘All Pasha
in a.d. 1871. Sec Davison, Rodcric H.: Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876
(thesis submitted to Harvard University for the degree of Ph.D., lit April, 1941), p-
298. (The author had kindly permitted the writer of this Study to read and cite a type¬
script copy of this work which was deposited in the library- of Harvard University. In
May 1952 Dr. Davison’s book was in process of revision with a view to publication.)

4 The Khatt of the 3rd November, 1839, "*3 reaffirmed in another Khait of the iSth
February, 1856, which was incorporated in Article 9 of the Paris Peace Treaty of the
30th March, 1856. The points of likeness and difference between these two charters
are pointed out by Davison, op. cit., pp. 34 ~ 35 -

252 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Sultan Mahmud II’s life-work had been to rid the Ottoman Empire
of the usurpers—Janissaries in the capital, dere beys in Anatolia and
Rumelia, and tribal chiefs in Arabia, Kurdistan, and Albania—who had
stridden into the political vacuum created by the decay of the Padishah’s
Slave-Household since the later decades of the sixteenth century of the
Christian Era. The immediate effect of Mahmud’s successful execution
of this task had been a concentration in the Sultan's hands of an auto¬
cratic power which he had used mainly for Westernizing the Army, on
the lines indicated above, to the neglect of corresponding reforms in the
civilian sphere. The common aim of the liberal Westernizing Ottoman
Turkish Muslim statesmen of the post-Mahmudian Age was to carry out
Mahmud’s still unaccomplished work by converting the Ottoman
Empire into a Rechtsstaat 1 whose subjects of all religions and nationali¬
ties would be secured so full a measure of equality before the law, accord¬
ing to the standards attained in the enlightened Western states of the
day, that the ra'iyeh would lose their desire to secede for the purpose of
founding or joining separate national states of their own.

This policy was progressively put into effect by four eminent states¬
men in three successive stages. The author of the Khatt of a.d. 1839 was
Mustafa Mchmed Reshid Pasha* (vivebat a.d. i8o2(?)-58), a critic of
Sultan Mahmud who had gained his own experience in diplomacy—in
London and Paris as well as at Kyutahiyeh and Constantinople—during
the years a.d. 1833-9. 3 After the Crimean War ( gerebalur a.d. 1853-6),
Reshld’s work was carried on by his two pupils and critics Mehmed
Emin ‘All Pasha ( vivebat a.d. 1815-71) and Mehmed Kccheji-zadc
Fu’ad Pasha (vivebat a.d. 1815-69)— a pair of Ottoman statesmen who
were honourably distinguished by their exemplary cooperation with one
another in practising the art of hastening slowly. Under the auspices of
‘All and Fu’ad, Midhat Pasha (vivebat a.d. 1822-84) performed marvel¬
lous pioneer work in applying the ideals of the Tanzimat to the problems
of Ottoman provincial administration; but, when, after the deaths of his
pair of predecessors, Midhat took over their responsibilities at the centre
of government, he failed to show their tact and judgement in grappling
with a more formidable crisis in Ottoman affairs than they had ever been
required to face.

Midhat 4 was the son of an Ottoman official of Pomak origin 5 and per¬
haps also of BektashI proclivities. 6 He was born at Ruschuk and grew
up at Lofcha (Loved), Viddin, and Constantinople. 7 He entered the
Ottoman public service at the age of fourteen in a.d. 1836, 8 but found

* Sec Bailey, op. cit., pp. 185-6.

1 The Khatt of the 3rd November, 1839, was to a large extent a reproduction of a
memorandum communicated by Reshid to Palmerston on the 12th August, 1839
(Bailey, op. cit., pp. 185-6 and 271-6).

1 Sec Bailey, op. cit., p. 181.

* For Midhat’s career see Davison, op. cit.; Babingcr, Fr., s.v. 'Midhat Pasha’, in

the Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. iii (Leyden 1936, Brill), pp. 481-2; (Antoine, Louis!
'L6ou2on-!e-Duc’: Midhat Pacha (Paris 1877, Dentu); Midhat, ‘Ali Haydar (Midhat
Pasha’a son): The Life of Midhat Pasha (London 1903. John Murray); eundem: Midhat
Pasha: Hayat-i-Siyasiycsi, Khidmdti, Menfd HaySli (Constantinople, A. H. 1325 — a.d.
1909, Hiial Pres*, 2 vols.). * See Davison, op. cit., p. 196.

6 Sec Davison, op. cit., p. 197; Babmger, op. cit.. p. 481.

7 Sec Babingcr, op. cit., loc. cit. * See Babinger, op. cit., loc. cit.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 253

an opportunity later in his career, in a.d. 1858, of spending six months
in the West and visiting Vienna, Paris, Brussels, and London. 1 Midhat
made his mark in the field of provincial administration, where Sultan
Mahmud II had cleared the ground by sweeping away the host of local
usurpers who had been on the verge of carving the Ottoman Empire into
successor-states, but had left to his own heirs on the Ottoman imperial
throne the task of building up a new system of local government, on
Western lines, through which the Porte could exercise and maintain its
recaptured authority over the Sultan’s hereditary dominions. In succes¬
sive tenures of provincial governorships in different quarters of the
Ottoman Empire, including not only Rumelia but ‘Iraq, Midhat worked
out, and applied with conspicuous personal success, a dual policy which
was taken by the Porte as the basis for a general reorganization of Otto¬
man provincial administration. With one hand he took action to make
the Ottoman regime not only tolerable but attractive to Ottoman subjects
of all communities by fostering mixed provincial councils, 2 mixed
schools, technical education, and public works, especially for the im¬
provement of communications. With the other hand he was equally
vigorous in suppressing Panslavism and other forms of separatism and
in maintaining law and order. 5

Midhat came to the front in a.d. 1854, when he was entrusted with
the task of restoring order in a Rumelia where repercussions of the
Crimean War were making themselves felt among the Slav Orthodox
Christian majority of the local population. 4 He distinguished himself
there by his success in suppressing unrest and brigandage and in settling
Circassian refugees from the Russian conquest of the North-Western
Caucasus. 5 After returning to the Grand Council of the Empire at
Constantinople, which he had already served as its Second Secretary,
and winning the esteem of the representatives of Turkey’s allies, 6 he
was appointed in a.d. 1857 to be governor of Viddin and Silistria; 7 and
thereafter, after visiting Western Europe 8 and serving the Grand Council
as its First Secretary, 9 he served during the years a.d. 1861—3 as governor
of a special province comprising the three Rumelian districts of Nish,
t)skiib, and Prizren 10 —a delicate task, since the Orthodox Christians in
the local population were Serb fellow tribesmen of the people of the
adjoining autonomous principality of Serbia and independent statelet of
Montenegro. In this special province Midhat worked for the establish¬
ment of genuinely representative institutions of local self-government,
for a just redistribution of taxation, and for material improvements that
would benefit the inhabitants without distinction of religion or national¬
ity.” His success here led to his being commissioned to advise and assist

* See Babinger, op. dt, loc. dt.; Davison, op. at, p. x 97 I Antoine, op. at, pp. 29

and 2?' .

- These had been envisaged in the Khatt of a.d. 1839 (Davison, op. at., pp. 27-28).
1 See Davison, op. dt., pp. 198-20x.

* See Babinger, op. dt, p. 481.

* See Antoine, od. cit,.pp. 20-21.. 6 See ibid., p. 22.

? See ibid., p. 26; Babinger, op. cit., p. 481.

* See above. » Sec Antoine, op. cit., p. 30.

«° See ibid., p. 30; Davison, op. dt, p. 189; Babinger, op. cit., p. 481.

»* See Antoine, op. cit, pp. 32 - 34 -

254 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Fu’Sd and ‘All Pashas in the drafting of a standard law 1 to regulate the
administration of provinces (vilayets) on the lines of his own practice, 2
and then being appointed, in a.d. 1864, to apply this new law in another
special province composed of the three Rumclian districts of Nish,
Viddin, and Silistria. 3 In this province in three years (a.d. 1864-7) Mid¬
hat built 3,000 kilometres of roads, 1,400 bridges, and three polytechnics:
one at Nish, one at Ruschuk, and one at Sofia. 4

Since a.d. 1858, Midhat had had the advantage of knowing something
of the West as well as Turkey at first hand, 5 and he was opposed to
mechanical imitations not suited to local conditions. 6 Perhaps his chief
strength was his courage in acting on his own initiative. 7 But his virtues,
signal though they were, were pitted against formidable adverse forces.
Though his policy of translating the classical Ottoman millet system
into Modern Western terms was the most humane and enlightened pro¬
gramme that could have been devised for improving the lot of a mixed
population of diverse creeds and nationalities, this aim did not appeal to
the Rumcliot Orthodox Christians of his generation, whose hearts were
already set on becoming citizens of national states of a type represented
in embryo by the contemporary Kingdom of Greece and Principality of
Serbia; and in these disruptive ambitions they were encouraged by
Russia, who was eager to go on fishing in troubled Rumelian waters.
Moreover, this attitude or the disaffected ra'iyeh and their foreign
instigators was largely justified by an unwillingness on the part of the
Muslim ‘ascendancy’ in Rumelia to waive its historic privileges, and on
the part of the conservatives at the Porte to commit themselves sincerely
and wholeheartedly to a policy of transforming the Ottoman Empire into
a commonwealth genuinely guaranteeing full equality before the law,
in the Modern Western sense of that ideal, to all its subjects without
religious discrimination.

The constitutional issue thus raised in nineteenth-century Turkey by
the scandal of a traditional discrimination against a non-Muslim majority
in the population of Rumelia gave rise to a corresponding issue within
the bosom of the ruling community itself; for the Muslim, including the
Turkish Muslim, subjects of the Porte, as well as the ra'iyeh, were
sufferers from a misgovernment that had its root in the Ottoman practice
of Islamic political theory. 8 As the point was put by Midhat Pasha
himself:

‘In the past our ruling idea was to satisfy Europe in Turkey in order
to keep Turkey in Europe. To-day our aspirations and our labours to
achieve reform spring from an impulse within ourselves, from thoughts
that are our own, and from an activity that is native to our country.’ 9

* This law of the Vilayets was promulgated in November 1864, and was revised in
a.d. 1867 and a.d. 1870. By a.d. 1868 the whole of the Ottoman Empire except 'Iriq
and the Yaman had been reorganized into provinces on the new pattern (Davison, op.
cit., pp. 189-90, 203, and 206; Kramers, J. H., s.v. 'Tanzim&t [-i-Khayriych]', in the
Encyclopaedia oj Itlam, vol. iv (Leyden 1934, Brill), p. 659).

* Sec Antoine, op. cit., p. 35. J See ibid., p. 29.

4 Sec ibid., p. 40. » See p. 253, above.

* See Antoine, op. cit., p. 57. < » See ibid., p. 44.

3 This point is emphasized by Davison in op. cit., p. v.

9 Midhat Pasha, quoted by Antoine, op. cit., pp. 57-58.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM

255

Accordingly, the outbreak in a.d. 1875 of an insurrection of the Serb
Orthodox Christians in Herzegovina, where there was acute tension
between the local ra'iyeh and a local Muslim 'ascendancy' consisting of
ex-Bogomil native Slav landlords, raised the question of constitutional
government for Turkish Muslim Ottoman subjects as well as the ques¬
tion of political independence for Rumeliot Orthodox Christians still
under Ottoman rule, and, when, in this crisis, Midhat, instead of being
sent to Herzegovina by the Porte, was appointed in August 1875 t0 be >
for the second time, Minister of Justice, he resigned in November 1875
and went into opposition. He was marked out for becoming the leader
of the ‘New 'Osmanlis’; 1 for in a.d. 1867 he had been recalled from his
Danubian province to Constantinople 1 to be President of a new Imperial
Council of State 3 (fungebatur a.d. 1868-9) ant *> since then, he had been
governor of the provinces of Baghdad 4 (fungebatur a.d. 1869-72) and
Salonica* (fungebatur October 1873-February 1874) and—for a spell of
three months (1st August-i9th October, 1872)—Grand Vizier. 6

In the movement for constitutional government on Western lines
that was now coming to a head within the bosom of the Ottoman
Turkish community, 7 an agitation was started on the 7th May, 1876, by
the Muslim theological students (‘softas’) 8 in Constantinople, and during

* The origins of the ‘New ‘Osmanlis’ (Tureici ‘Ycni ’Osmanlilar’, mistranslated into
French as 'Jeunes Turcs’, according to Davison, op. cit., p. 277) are obscure (ibid.,
p. 279). The fathers of the movement were men of letters not employed in the Ottoman
government service (pp. 217-18)—Ibrahim Shinisi (pp. 230-5), Nfimyq Kcmal fpp.
235—41). Ziyfi (pp. 241-8), and the ‘Zcalot’-mindcd Central Asian Turk ‘Ali Su'avi (pp.
250-2)—who were, all alike, independent publicists, language reformers, and patriots,
but in other respects were very diverse (p. 253). Their first revolt was against the classical
Ottoman Turkish literary style, which was remote from the living language of the day,
but by a.d. 1865 they were already advocating constitutional government for Turkey
in the Western style (p. 280), and in a.d. 1867 they joined with three pashas in publishing
a criticism of the withdrawal of the Ottoman garrisons from Serbia and thereby incurred
the displeasure of ‘Alt Pasha (pp. 21C-16 and 218). There was, indeed, an abortive con¬
spiracy in a.d. 1867 against 'All and Fu’fid’s regime (p. 282). In consequence, Namyq
Kcmil, Ziyfi, and ‘Ali Su'avi had to flee to Paris, whither ShinSsi had preceded them
in a.d. 1864 on a second visit (Shinfisi had been sent there for the first time in a.d.
1843 at the age of seventeen by Sultan 'Abd-al-Mejid and had taken part there in the
revolution of a.d. 1848 before coming home in a.d. 1851). The four 'New ‘Osmanli’
leaders were unable to return to Turkey till after the death of ‘Ali Pasha in A.D. i 87 ».
Nfimyq Kcmfil was banished from Constantinople to Cyprus on account of the sensation
created by the production, in a.d. 1873, of his patriotic play Vdtdn, yahud Silistert
(pp. ? 92 - 6 ). .

* See Antoine, op. cit., p. 74.

1 This Council of State, which was created by dividing the existing Grand Council
of the Empire (alias ‘Tanzimat Council’) into a Council of State and a High Court of
Justice (sec Kramers, J. H., s.v. ‘Tanzimat [-i-Khayriych]’, in the Encyclopaedia of
Islam, vol. iv (Leyden 1934, Brill), p. 657). "as duly organized on a model that was
French except in one crucial point in which there was no analogy between the political
circumstances in the France and in the Turkey of Midhat’s day. In the Turkey of a.d.
1867 the seats on the Council had to be distributed between the different communities
of which the population of the Ottoman Empire was composed, and the non-Muslim
communities were flagrantly under-represented (according to Davison, op. cit., pp. 303-
4, they were given 13 seats out of 50; according to Antoine, op. cit., p. 75, they were
given 3 scats out of 16).

* See Antoine, op. cit., pp. 80-8x. In his governorship of Baghdad, Midhat achieved
results second only to those achieved by him in the Danube Province in a.d. 1864-7.

s See ibid., p. 88. . , 4 See ibid., p. 88.

’ The Turkish community had been alienated from the existing regime by the famine
of a.d. 1873-4, which had been worst in the Turkish-inhabited areas of the Empire,
e.g. in Central Anatolia (Davison, op. cit., pp. 401-2).

3 Sec Davison, op. cit., pp. 432-31 Midhat, 'AH Haydar JMidhat Pasha s son]: The
Life of Midhat Pasha (London 1903, John Murray), p. 8t. Since the extirpation of the

256 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the night of the 29th~3oth May the reigning sultan ‘Abd-al-‘AzIz was
deposed on the strength of a fetvd (legal opinion) 1 rendered by the
revolutionary clerics’ 2 leader Khayrallah, whose followers’ demonstra¬
tions on the ioth and nth May had prevailed upon the intimidated
Sultan to appoint him Sheykh-el-IslSm (chief of the Islamic religious
jurisconsults in the Ottoman Empire). From that date Midhat was
virtually in power—though it was not till the 18th December, 1876, that
he became Grand Vizier for the second time—and a constitution was
duly promulgated by Sultan ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz’s second successor 3 Sultan
‘Abd-al-Hamid on the 23rd December of the same year; but this
gleam of light had no sooner shone out than it was eclipsed by a deluge
of disasters.

The Herzegovinian insurgents had been neither pacified nor sup¬
pressed; Montenegro and Serbia had gone to war with Turkey on their
behalf; a conference of representatives of the Powers which had
assembled in Constantinople to try to restore peace ignored the new
Ottoman Constitution and failed to fulfil its own mission; the victory of
Russia in a new Russo-Turkish war (gerebatur a.d. 1877-8) cut down
the Ottoman dominions in Rumclia to a remnant that was no longer
permanently tenable, even after the Great Bulgaria of the original Russo-
Turkish peace treaty of San Stefano (pactum 3rd March, 1878) had been
pared down and split in two by the terms of the revisionary peace treaty
of Berlin {pactum 13th July, 1878); the administration of six sources of
public revenue from indirect taxation was handed over by the Ottoman
Government to an international council of foreign bondholders on the
20th December, 1881; and, meanwhile, Sultan ‘Abd-al-Hamid had
established his autocratic control over what remained of the Ottoman
Empire’s territory and sovereignty by dismissing the undiplomatic
constitutionalist Midhat Pasha from office on the 5th February, 1877,
and suspending the constitution itself on the 14th February, 1878.
After a cat-and-mouse persecution, the Ottoman protagonist of a
Modern Western constitutionalism was tried and convicted in May

Januaries in a.d. 1826 the softas had taken over the Janissaries’ traditional role of serving
as the principal political ‘pressure group’ in the capital of the Empire. (In a sense, the
'ClemS were the Janissaries’ heirs by right of conquest; for their secession from the
camp of reaction to the camp of reform had been the decisive change in the Ottoman
domestic political situation which had made it possible for Sultan MahmQd II to suc¬
ceed in an enterprise which had proved too difficult for hi* predecessor Sultan Selim III).
In a.d. 1853 the softas had agitated for war against Russia, and in a.d. 1876 it was again
their anti-Russian feeling that moved them to support the constitutionalists (Davison,
op. cit., pp. 430 -ih They were brought into the constitutionalist camp by a leading
'Slim, Khayrallah Efendi (ibid., p. 426).

1 Sec Davison, op. cit., p. 436; Midhat, op. cit, p. 83.

3 To minds attuned to Modem Western social and constitutional history, the spectacle
of clerics taking the lead in a movement for political reform on liberal lines would per¬
haps be still more surprising than to see military officers playing this part. The liberalism
of these nineteenth-century Ottoman 'khojas' had the same origin as the liberalism of
their contemporaries in the Ottoman Army. Their profession required that they should
be educated; and an education in the traditional Islamic theology and literature enlarged
the mind, even though it did not lead so directly to Western 'dangerous thoughts’ as
the technical education of the new-model Ottoman military officers.

’ On the authority of another fetvd from the Sheykh-el-Islim, Khayrallah, ‘Abd-al-
‘Aziz’s successor Murad V had been replaced in his turn, on the 31st August, 1876,
on the ground that he was mentally deranged, by his astutely perverse-minded brother
‘Abd-al-Hamid II.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 257
1881 on a preposterous charge of having murdered the deposed Sultan
'Abd-al-'Aziz 1 and was banished to Ta’if in the Hijaz to be murdered
there by ‘Abd-al-Hamld’s orders . 2

Simultaneously, Egypt was overwhelmed by a comparable concatena¬
tion of catastrophes. In a.d. 1876 she paid the penalty for her rulers’
financial improvidence by forfeiting her financial autonomy to an inter¬
national Cause de la Dette, and in a.d. 1882 an Egyptian nationalist
movement, whose programme was to rescue Egypt from the financial
control of foreign creditors by bringing the incompetent Turkish auto¬
cracy of the Khedive under the constitutional control of the Egyptian
people, was crushed by the armed intervention of a single foreign Power.
The leader of the Egyptian nationalists, Ahmad ‘Ar 5 bl Pasha, suffered
Midhat Pasha’s political fate of being dismissed from office, tried, con¬
victed, and sent into exile, 3 and the British expeditionary force remained
in occupation in Egypt. Its presence there enabled the British Govern¬
ment to brin^ the finances—and, with them, the administration—of
Egypt under its own paramount control, but did not avail to save the
Sudan, south of Wadi Halfah, from being lost to Egypt through the
insurrection of the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad in a.d. 1881-5.

It will be seen that the ingredients of the cup of wrath were the same
for both Egypt and Turkey, but they were mixed in different brews which
had diverse effects on the patients in the next chapters of their histories.

In Turkey’s catastrophe the insurrection of a disaffected Rumeliot
subject population was the occasion of the other tribulations, whereas
in Egypt’s catastrophe the insurrection in the Sudan was their conse¬
quence. In Egypt the troubles began with the imposition of foreign
financial control, whereas in Turkey a partial loss of financial sovereignty
was the aftermath of insurrection and war. As for the Egyptian nationalist
movement of which ‘Ar 5 bl Pasha was at least the nominal leader, it was
comparable to the contemporary nationalist movements among the
Rumeliot Orthodox Christians inasmuch as, like these, it was a revolt
of a non-Turkish subject population against a local Turkish ‘ascendancy’.
The revolt in Egypt was initiated by Arab officers of an Egyptian Army
which was still officered predominantly by Turks and Albanians. At
the same time, this movement headed by ‘ArabI at Cairo in a.d. 1882
resembled the movement led by Midhat at Constantinople in a.d. 1876
in expressing, not a will to secede, but a demand, emanating from the
Muslim people of the country, for the replacement of an inefficient
autocracy by a parliamentary constitutional regime of the contemporary
Western pattern.

The Failure of the Arabs to Respond to a Continuing Challenge of Western
Aggression

Both constitutional movements were suppressed; but their suppres¬
sion was accomplished by different means in the two cases, and this

1 See Babinger, op. at., p. 482.

* Babingcr, loc. cit.. gives the date of the crime as the 30th April, 1S83; other authori¬
ties give divers dates (c.g. the 8th May and the 8th Julv) in a.d. 1884.

2 'Arab! was banished for life to Ceylon, but was allowed to return to Egypt in A.D.
1901.

258 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
difference drove the two countries along divergent political courses. In
Turkey the ‘New ‘Osmanlis’ were suppressed by Sultan 'Abd-al-Hamld
without recourse to foreign aid, with the result that, for the next thirty-
one years (a.d. 1877-1908), Turkey was under the yoke of a native auto¬
crat. In Egypt, ‘Ar§bi and his partisans were crushed by the armed
intervention of a Western Power, with the result that for the next
fifty-four years (a.d. 1882-1936) Egypt was under foreign military
occupation. In other words, in this next chapter of Ottoman history
Turkey went through China’s experience while Egypt went through
India’s. Turkey, like China, preserved for herself the blessing of
freedom to make her own mistakes at the price of having to endure the
unmitigated consequences of them, whereas Egypt was afflicted with the
blight of being managed, rehabilitated, and shielded by alien hands at
the cost of being debarred, so long as this benevolently stifling unsought
tutelage lasted, from learning through the suffering that had been found
to be Man’s one effective school of practical wisdom.

Thus Egypt had escaped from an uncongenial Turkish domination
only to become a pawn on the chessboard of Western power politics.
This nineteenth-century Egyptian experience was shared by other Arab
countries outside the bounds of the desert and highland fastnesses of the
Arabian Peninsula itself; and a retrospect of this chapter of these Arab
countries’ history would lend colour to the view that their weakness had
been ruthlessly exploited by Modern Western politicians to solve
Western problems at the Arabs’ expense.

France, for example, 1 had embarked in A.D. 1830 on the conquest of
Algeria in compensation for the collapse of a Napoleonic Empire in
Europe; in a.d. 1881 she had imposed a French protectorate on Tunisia,
with Bismarck’s blessing, in compensation for her defeat in the Franco-
German War of a.d. 1870-1; in a.d. 1907-12 she had proceeded, with
Great Britain’s blessing, to impose a French protectorate on Morocco in
compensation for her blunder, in a.d. 1882, in missing her opportunity
to go into partnership with Great Britain in the occupation and control
of Egypt; and in a.d. 1920 she had attacked and conquered Syria, with
a mandate from the League of Nations, in compensation for having
been attacked and all but conquered, herself, by Germany in the General
War of a.d. 1914-18. Italy’s attack on the Ottoman Arab provinces in
Libya in a.d. 1911, with the connivance of the other Great Powers, had
likewise been delivered in compensation for the shortness of the measure
which Italy had received in the partition of Tropical Africa between
European Powers during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

On the same cynical principle of making the defenceless pay, the
Zionists on the 14th May, 1948, had set up-a state of Israel in Palestine
by force of arms in a war that had resulted in more than half a million
Palestinian Arabs losing their homes, in compensation for atrocities
committed against Jews in a.d. 1933-45, not > n the Levant, but in
Europe, and not by Arabs, but by Germans. 2 The French in a.d. 1920
could defend their act of aggression with a show of legality by exhibiting

* See X. ix. ir.

* See pp. 288-92, below—especially p. 290, nn. 1 and 3.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 259

a licence from the League of Nations to violate the rights of the Arab
people of Syria because other members of the League were feeling
sympathy with France over her sufferings at Germany’s hands in the
First World War, and because Great Britain, in particular, was grate¬
ful to France for having taken the brunt of the German attack on the
Western allies, was uneasy in her conscience over having exercised her
option to leave unratified a treaty, guaranteeing France in Europe, which
she had signed on the 28th June, 1919, and was anxious to obtain the
acquiescence of France in British ambitions at the expense of the Arab
peoples of Palestine and 'Ir 5 q. By a similar operation of psychological
forces the Zionists obtained a retrospective condonation from the
United Nations Organization for their violation of the rights of the
Arab people of Palestine 1 because the Western World as a whole was
feeling sympathy with the Jews over their sufferings at Germany’s
hands during the Second World War and the six years preceding its out¬
break, and because Westerners were ashamed that such atrocities should
have been committed by a Western nation. The United States and the
Soviet Union in a.d. 1948, like Great Britain in 1920, had an additional
motive for condoning an act of injustice against an Arab people. In a.d.
1948 the United States and the Soviet Union were competing for Jewish
goodwill in a 'cold war’ which by that time they were waging with one
another, as the Allied and Associated Powers had been competing with
Germany for Jewish goodwill in the First World War at the time when
the British Government had issued the Balfour Declaration and the
American, French, and Italian Governments had adhered to it.

An impartial non-Wcstcrn observer’s verdict would assuredly have
been that, however grievously the Western peoples might have "sinned
against one another and against the Jewish stranger in their midst, and
however desirable it might be that they should make atonement at their
own expense, there was neither merit nor justice in their compensating
their victims at the expense of innocent third parties. As against Zionist
and Western aggressors, the Arabs had an unanswerable moral case; but,
with the exception of the ex-Ottoman Maghribls, 2 they could be criti¬
cized for their improvidence in having severed their political connexion
with their Turkish fellow subjects of an Ottoman Padishah when they
were as impotent to defend themselves unaided against aggression as
they had been proved to be by the uniform sequel in the histories of
Egypt, Palestine, the Lebanon, Syria, and 'Iraq; and they could be
blamed much more severely for their moral failure in not having taken
any serious steps to put their own house in order when, in the next
chapter of the story, they had become masters of their own house at last.

1 This was the moral implication of the admission of the State of Israel to membership
in the United Nations on the nth May, 1949, three days before the first anniversary of
the Zionists’ original act of aggression.

* The Moroccans had always consistently played a lone hand, but the Algerines,
Tunisians, and Tripolitanians, whose local 'Osmanli rulers had virtually ignored the
suzerainty of the Porte in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had followed their
rulers from a.d. 1830 onwards in seeking to strengthen their links with the Ottoman
Empire as a safeguard against the danger of Western imperialism which had been sud¬
denly and startlingly brought to their attention by the French occupation of Algiers (see
p. 230, above).

260 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
This stricture applied in particular to Egypt after the British recogni¬
tion of her independence, subject only to four reservations, on the 28th
February, 1922;' to ‘Ir 5 q after the coming into force of the Anglo-'Iraqt
treaty of the 30th June, 1930, through the admission of ‘Iraq to member¬
ship in the League of Nations on the 3rd October, 1932; and to Syria
and the Lebanon after the rendition by the French of their Levantine
mandates on the 3rd January, 1944. From those dates onwards, the
ruling class in the principal Arab countries had been substantially free
to grapple with domestic problems—economic, social, and political—
and its failure to address itself to this urgent task was a more grievous
sin against the Arabic Society, and a more dangerous threat to its sur¬
vival, than the blackest deeds of alien aggressors. This internal weakness
was the cause of the Arab League’s egregious failure in a.d. 1948-9 to
hold its own on the battlefield, and even to maintain a united political
front, against an infant Israeli state which, on paper, was outmatched
in strength singly by each of the Arab states nominally banded together
against it. The ‘displacement’ of the Arab population of the greater part
of Palestine was an Arab calamity that was the consequence of a Jewish
offence; the other Arab peoples’ impotence to save their Palestinian
brethren from this fate was an Arab humiliation that the Arabs had
brought upon themselves.

The military and political weakness exhibited by the Arab states under
this test was a reflection of their social rottenness; this underlying evil
was the responsibility of the ruling class; and this class could not
plausibly plead, as an excuse for their sin of omission, that the task of
social salvage was beyond their strength, considering the results achieved
by the efforts of their counterparts in Turkey in the same generation. In
Turkey and the ex-Ottoman Arab countries the twentieth-century ruling
class was the heir of one and the same social heritage; and the social
transformation that had been accomplished in Turkey in the quarter of
a century opening in a.d. 1923 set a standard for these Arab countries
which was as peremptory as it was reasonable. What Turkey had
managed to achieve in her poverty was not too much to expect of
Egypt, with her wealth in cotton, or of ‘Iraq, with her wealth in oil; and
the presence here of these material resources offering ways and means,
which a Turkish statesmanship might have envied, for carrying out a
programme of social reform made the perpetuation in these Arab
countries of gross economic inequalities between an affluent minority
and an indigent mass far more invidious and explosive than it would have
been if their latent riches had not been discovered and tapped. The one

E lea open to the ex-Ottoman Arab ruling class was that its moral had
een atrophied by a long bout of Western tutelage; but, except perhaps
in the case of Egypt, which had been under British occupation for
fifty-four years, this plea was conclusively rebutted by chronology, since

' In A.D. 1952—between the date in a.d. 1949 when this passage had been written
and the date at which it was being revised in galley proof—a coup d'ilat had been made
in Egypt by a group of military officers, headed by General Najib ( Gallo-Acgyptiaci
Neguib). In the autumn of a.d. 1952 it was not yet possible to forecast the prospects
of the radical and comprehens ve programme for national regeneration which had
been launched in Egypt by this revolutionary new regime.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 261
all the states members of the Arab League that disputed the establish¬
ment of the state of Israel in a.d. 1948 were ex hypothesi then already
independent, and none of these except Egypt had come under Western
control before the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the First
World War (gerebatur a.d. 1914-18), so that none of them except Egypt
had been under Western tutelage for a longer spell than a quarter of a
century.

The Failure of a Turkish Committee of Union and Progress to Maintain the
Ottoman Empire

In Turkey, as we have noted, the drama of Westernization ran into
a third and a fourth act which had no parallel in contemporary Arab
history.

The third act opened in Turkey on the 22nd-24th July, 1908, when
on three consecutive days a hitherto subterranean Committee of Union
and Progress raised the standard of revolt against ‘Abd-al-Hamid’s
autocracy in the Macedonian garrison town of Resna, proclaimed at
Salonica the re-establishment of the constitution of a.d. 1876, and
compelled Sultan ‘Abd-al-Hamld at Constantinople to ratify their
revolutionary act. This attempt on the part of a second generation of
'New ‘Osmanlis’ to save the Ottoman Empire’s existence by transform¬
ing it into a parliamentary constitutional state on a Western pattern was
no more successful than the first; and this time it became manifest that
the failure was due to an intrinsic flaw in the policy, for this time, when
‘Abd-al-Hamid tried to repeat the counter-revolution which he had
accomplished in a.d. 1877, he did not recover his autocratic power but
forfeited his throne. From the deposition of‘Abd-al-Hamid in a.d. 1909
to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in a.d. 1918, the responsibility
for Turkey’s fortunes was on the heads of the Unionists.

The fatal weakness of the ‘New ‘Osmanlis’ programme was that, in a
multi-national empire whose peoples had been captivated by the Western
political ideal of Nationalism, ‘union’ and ‘progress’ were incompatible
objectives; and, when the pressure of events forced the party into making
a choice, they sacrificed an attainable progress to the forlorn hope of
still saving an untenable union. A twentieth-century Ottoman Empire
stood no better a chance than a twentieth-century Hapsburg Monarchy
of being converted into a Switzerland writ large; and the fraternization
between members of long discordant millets in the first moment of
excitement and relief at a sudden unexpected release from the common
yoke of ‘Abd-al-Hamid’s tyranny was proved by its brevity to be a
political mirage. On second thoughts the members of the non-Muslim
communities reverted to a disbelief, born of melancholy experience, in
the possibility of their ever being admitted to any genuine equality under
the Ottoman flag with their Turkish masters; and, even if they had been
convinced that this miracle would come to pass, it may be doubted
whether, when it came to the point, they would have been willing to
sacrifice to an ideal of Ottoman fraternity their hopes of being eventually
re-united with their already independent brethren in separate national
states of their own. By a.d. 1908 these feelings had come to be shared

262 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
with the non-Muslim Greek, Serb, Bulgar, and Armenian subjects of
the Ottoman Empire by the non-Turkish Muslim Arabs, Albanians,
and Kurds. In these circumstances the Empire could be held together
only by force majeure, and, to hold it by force, an Hamidian tyranny
would have to be reimposed by the Turks alone on all their non-Turkish
fellow Ottomans, Muslims as well as Christians.

Desperate though it was, this tour de force was nevertheless attempted
by the Committee of Union and Progress, and a folly which cannot be
condoned can at least be explained.

In the first place the Ottoman Empire was still in being, and few
imperial peoples had ever had the strength of mind, which the British
were to show in a . d . 1947, to give up an untenable empire voluntarily
without waiting for it to be wrested from them. The Committee of
Union and Progress spent seven of their ten years of grace in waging
ruinous wars against irresistible aggressors: a war with Italy ( gerebatur
a.d. 1911—13) which failed to save Tnpolitania and Cyrcnaica; a war with
the Balkan States ( gerebatur a . d . 1912-13) which failed to save anything
in Rumclia beyond the western suburbs of Adrianople; and a war with
the Powers of the Entente {gerebatur a . d . 1914-18) which dealt the
Ottoman Empire its coup degrdee after having been wantonly undertaken
in the ill-conceived hope that, with Germany’s aid, this military adven¬
ture might compensate Turkey for her losses in Rumelia by enabling
her to recover Egypt and other ex-Ottoman Arab territories in Africa
and to win territories inhabited by non-Ottoman Turkish peoples in

the Russian Empire which had never been under Ottoman rule. 1

A second reason why the Committee of Union and Progress sacrificed
the national interests of the Turkish people in a losing battle to main¬
tain the Ottoman Empire was that the strength of the party was drawn
from the Macedonian remnant of the Rumeliot Turkish ‘ascendancy’. The
party headquarters were at Salonica; 2 the backing in the Army, which
made the revolution of a . d . 1908 practicable, came from officers of the
Macedonian garrison; and an anxiety for the preservation of Ottoman
sovereignty over Macedonia determined the date of the pronunciamiento
—for Tal'at’s and Enver’s revolution in a . d . 1908 was precipitated, like
the abortive revolutions of Midhat Pasha at Constantinople in a . d . 1876

» The Pan-Turanian idea (see p. ini, n. 2, above), which was taken up by ‘the Young
Turks’ (as ‘the New ‘Osmanlis’ may be styled without inaccuracy in this context) during
the Russo-Turkish war of a.d. 1914-18, and for which Enver Pasha eventually gave his
life on a battlefield in Soviet Russian Central Asia, had originated as a jtu d'espnt in the
mind of an imaginative French Consul-General at Salonica, who had coined a ‘Pan-
Turanianism’ on the analogy of an already current ‘Pan-Germanism’ and ‘Pan-Slavism’
(see Cahun, L^on: Introduction d VHistoire de I'Asie (Paris 1896, Colin)).

2 Salonica was well qualified for serving as a centre for a Westernizing Turkish
political movement at this stage of Ottoman history. It was free from the incubus of
the classical Ottoman regime which was still weighing heavily on Constantinople. It was
the regional capital of the remnant of Rumelia, whose Turkish inhabitants were the
most energetic and progressive element in the Turkish population of the Ottoman
Empire. The Salonican Turks were linked, through the Dbnmc, with their Sephardi
Jewish fellow townsmen, who had been kept in touch with the Modem Western World
by their Spanish origin and their commercial interests (sec II. ii. 246-7). And, finally,
Salonica, like Constantinople, had been linked up with Continental Western Europe by
rail. The writer remembers the impression made on him, on his first visit to Salonica in
June 1912, as his ship approached the quay, by the sight of Hungarian, Austrian, and
German railway wagons standing there.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 263

and 'Ar 5 bi Pasha at Cairo in a.d. 1882, by a fear that the overthrow of a
native autocracy might be anticipated by a foreign intervention to which
Macedonia seemed to be more imminently exposed in a . d . 1908 than
any other outlying part of the Ottoman Empire of that date.

The Success of Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk in Creating a Turkish National
State

On the 23rd July, 1919, when Mustafa Kemal repeated at Erzerum
the pronunciamiento made by Enver and Niazi at Resna on the 22nd July,
1908, the prospects for Turkey appeared, on a superficial view, to have
changed radically to her disadvantage. The Padishah whom a mutinous
officer was defying in a . d . 1919 was not, like ‘Abd-al-Hamid, an autocrat
fighting for his own hand; he was a puppet in the hands of a victorious
coalition of foreign Powers which had just overthrown not only Turkey
but her mighty ally Germany; and the spur which had goaded Mustafa
Kemal into hoisting his revolutionary colours was not the menace of
foreign aggression against an outlying territory where the Turkish
element in the population was in a minority; it was the accomplished
fact of a Greek invasion—sponsored by Great Britain, France, and the
United States—of a predominantly Turkish Anatolia. As it turned out,
however, these grim circumstances were so many blessings in disguise,
since they inspired the Rumeliot leaders of a new Turkish Westernizing
movement with the strength of mind at last to have the full courage of
their convictions, and moved the mass of the Turkish people in Anatolia
for the first time readily to follow a revolutionary westward lead as the
only remaining chance of saving themselves from a now imminent
threat of annihilation. This intellectual and emotional revolution fired
a new-born Turkish nation to a high pitch of heroism and a degree of
psychic and social malleability that proved more than a match for the
adversities by which this spirit had been evoked. The heroism displayed
itself in a decisive victory in a battle for national survival against
apparently hopeless odds in the years a.d. 1919-22; the malleability in a
still more hardly won success in a long-drawn-out struggle for national
regeneration.

The new ideas and aims of Mustafa Kem 3 l and his companions were
proclaimed in a ‘National Pact’ that was adopted on the 28th January,
1920, by the Ottoman Parliament at Constantinople. The key-note—and
the strength—of the new policy was a resolve to abandon wild-goose
chases and to concentrate on the whole-hearted pursuit of practicable
objectives; and the ability to take this resolve was a priceless gain which
the Turkish Nationalists owed to their ‘New ‘Osmanli’ predecessors’
staggering losses. To renounce the ambition of recovering sovereignty
over ex-Ottoman territories inhabited by a majority of Arabs or a
majority of Orthodox Christians that had already been lost by a.d. 1920
was less difficult than it had been to abandon the will to retain sover¬
eignty over those territories while they were still, however precariously,
in Turkey’s possession. To dismiss the Pan-Turanian dream of a
compensatory empire to be carved out of Turkish territories in the
Caucasus and Central Asia at Russia’s expense was likewise less difficult

264 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
now that Turkey and Russia were no longer at war with one another but
were companions in defeat, with the consequence in Russia that the
fallen Tsardom had been replaced by a Communist regime which, like
the Turkish National Movement in a.d. 1920, was a target of Western
hostility and was accordingly disposed to make common cause with the
Turkish Nationalists in their parallel struggle for existence. In this new
situation the Turkish Nationalists resolutely turned away from a vision¬
ary Pan-Turanian future as well as from an irretrievable Ottoman past,
and addressed themselves to the task of carving a Turkish national
successor-state of the Ottoman Empire out of Ottoman territories with
a Turkish majority in their population, with a view to building up the
life of this new Turkish nation on completely Western foundations.

It will be seen that this programme was a Turkish counterpart of
programmes that the ex-Ottoman Orthodox Christian peoples had been
carrying out by degrees for more than a hundred years past; and this
likeness was not accidental; it was due to a deliberate adoption, by the
leaders of the new Turkish National Movement, of a policy which,
within their own lifetimes, had served their Orthodox Christian neigh¬
bours well at Turkey’s expense. This spectacle had made a vivid impres¬
sion on the imagination of the Turkish Nationalist leaders because they
had seen it at close quarters; for the moving spirits in the Nationalist
Movement were ex-Unionists who, like the moving spirits on the Com¬
mittee of Union and Progress during the years a.d. 1908-18, were
Macedonian Turks. Mustafa Kemal—whose beard, if he had worn one,
would have been as blond as Mchmcd ‘All’s- came from Salonica;
Fethi came from Uskub; but, in and after a.d. 1919, these Rumcliot
Turkish nationalists showed their mettle by refusing to allow their
policy to be governed by a nostalgia for a Macedonian fatherland that
Tal'at and Enver had failed to save. They eschewed the perversity of the
Macedonian Turkish Unionists who had sacrificed Turkey in a vain
attempt to save Macedonia, and the even greater perversity of the
Macedonian Bulgar nationalist refugees who had sacrificed Bulgaria in
a vain attempt to reconquer Macedonia from a Bulgarian base of opera¬
tions. Mustafa Kem 5 l and his Macedonian Turkish nationalist com¬
panions stoically turned their backs on a beloved Rumelian homeland,
which had once been the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in order to
bring to life a new Turkish nation in an outlandish Anatolia 1 whose

* The strength and persistence of these Rumcliot Turkish exiles’ homesickness was
borne in upon the writer of this Study on the i ith November, 1948, when, on the west
bank of the River Jeyhun, in the lowlands of Cilicia, in the south-eastern comer of
Anatolia, he was spending a day with the ex-Rumeliot Turkish owner and operator of
an orange plantation. This alert, progressive, and sanguine-minded Cilician planter was
justifiably proud of the wealth that his brother and he had conjured, within the past
twenty-five years, out of ground that had been out of cultivation when it had been
assigned to his family in compensation for the estates that they had forfeited in their
native Thessaly as a result of the exchange of populations that had followed the Graeco-
Turkish War of A.D. 1919-22. His heart was in the future of a new Westernizing
Turkey-in-Asia, and he was particularly enthusiastic about the economic potentialities
that he was doing so much personally to develop in his own new home in Cilicia. Yet,
when the writer happened to mention that he had once visited Ycnishehr (Graeci
Llrissa), his Cilician Turkish host’s family’s Thessalian native town, the forward-looking
pioneer enthusiast for a new Turkey’s Cilician California was suddenly transformed into
a backward-looking scion of a Rumcliot Ottoman Turkish Muslim ‘ascendancy’. He

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 265

people—Turks and Muslims though they were—had been, not the
Ottoman Turks’ fellow conquerors, but the fellow victims of a Rumeliot
Ottoman Turkish ‘ascendancy's’ conquered Orthodox Christian subjects
in Europe. 1

Thus, in setting out to create a new Turkish national state in Anatolia,
Mustafa Kemal and his companions were faithfully following the ex¬
ample of their Greek and Serb fellow Rumeliots who had founded a new
Greek and new Serb national state in two outlying tracts of the Balkan
Peninsula a hundred years earlier; and, in the same vein, they were using
the Modern Western magic formula of Nationalism to conjure back into
political consciousness a people that had been lying dormant for cen¬
turies under an Ottoman domination. In Anatolia the ground had been
prepared for this by the imposition of military conscription on all male
Muslim Ottoman subjects since the reign of Sultan Mahmud II ( impera -
bat a.d. 1808-39); but of course Mahmud had had no more intention of
fostering a Turkish nationalism than Mehmcd ‘All had had of fostering
an Egyptian nationalism when he had introduced this Modern Western
military institution into his dominions.

In the fourth act of the drama in Turkey—an act which was not staged
till a hundred and thirty years after the play had been opened there by the
accession of Sultan Selim III—the Islamic World was the scene of an
adventure in Westernization which, in the crucial points of audacity,
speed, comprehensiveness, and wholeheartedness, could challenge
comparison with Peter the Great’s work in Russia and with the Meiji
Revolution in Japan. Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk saw that his first objective
—which was to defeat the Greeks’ attempt to conquer by force of arms
a vital part of the Turkish national patrimony in Anatolia—was no more

began eagerly to inquire what the English traveller had thought of the landmarks of
the Thessalian exile’s childhood in Yenishehr—first and foremost, the local mosques.

1 The ‘Osmanlis, starting from the north-west corner of the Anatolian Plateau, had
built up their power by north-westward conquests at the expense of Orthodox Christian
principalities in the Balkan Peninsula before turning their arms south-eastward against
Turkish principalities in Anatolia (see II. ii. 150-4); *«>d they had met with the more
stubborn resistance from Turks who chafed under a yoke imposed by kinsmen and
coreligionists still more restlessly than the Orthodox Christians repined at a, for them,
alien Ottoman rule. After defeating at Nicopoiis in A.D. 1396 the Western Christian
Crusaders who had come to his European Orthodox Christian victims’ aid, the Otto¬
man Sultan Bnyczid I had been defeated at Ankara in a.d. 1402 by his Anatolian Muslim
Turkish victims’ Transoxanian Turkish Muslim champion TimOr. The dethroned Ana¬
tolian Turkish princes’ appeal to TimOr had been made by them, and entertained by
him. in the name of a Pan-Turkish and Pan-Islamic solidarity against an Ottoman
Turkish conqueror who had impiously ignored the bond of a common religion and
nationality; and, though the Ottoman Empire managed to recover from an all but mortal
blow struck by Central Asian Turkish hands, and succeeded in reimposing its yoke on
Anatolian Turkish necks, the Ottoman Padishah’s Anatolian Turkish Muslim, like his
Rumeliot Orthodox Christian, subjects remained disaffected at heart—as they showed
on the religious plane by their readiness to fall away from the Sunni orthodoxy of their
'Osmanli masters to the heresies of Sheykh Bcdr-ed-Din and Shah IsmS’il and Hajji
Bektash (sec I. i. 365 and 382-3; IV. iv. 08-69; V.v. it: and 295; and V. v. 662-5)and
on the political plane by the re-emergence of the long-suppressed Anatolian Turkish
principalities in the form of emb^onic successor-states of the Ottoman Empire on
the morrow of the Great Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74. On the eve of the
repression of Bektashism by Sultan Mahmud II in A.D. 1826 (sec p. 267. n. 3, below),
■there are estimated to have been seven million Bektashis in the Ottoman Empire, mostly
in Anatolia (Birgc, J. K.: The Beklashi Order of Dervishes (London 1937. Luzac), p. 15).
The ‘Alcvi peasantry of Anatolia had a consciousness of affinity with the Christians
(ibid., p. 210).

B 2SSS.vin K 2

266 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
than a necessary military preliminary to a social and cultural enterprise,
and that, if he were to allow an exhausted Turkish people to take a
victory in the field as an excuse for resting on their oars, the extinction
of Turkey would have been postponed without having been perman¬
ently averted. He therefore did not wait for a military decision in the
Graeco-Turkish War of a.d. 1919-22 in choosing his moment for
launching his Westernization programme. He launched it while the
Turks were still fighting with their backs to the wall, and he followed up
the return of peace without a pause by bending all the strength of his
demonic will-power to the waging of a 'total war’ of social and cultural
transformation. A Turk of that generation might have found it hard to
say whether the military war-years a . d . 1911-22 or the cultural war-years
a.d. 1922-8 were the more severe of these two ordeals.

The range and speed of the campaign of Westernization in Turkey
during the seven years opening with the year a.d. 1922 can be indicated
by mentioning four revolutionary changes that were carried through
within that brief span of time. Those seven years in Turkey saw the
disestablishment of Islam and secularization of the national life; 1 the
social emancipation of women; 2 the transfer of Turkey’s intellectual
affiliations from the Islamic to the Western cultural tradition through
the substitution of the Latin for the Arabic Alphabet as the medium for
conveying the Ottoman Turkish language; 1 and the apprenticing of
Turkish hands to the mysteries of a Modern Western technology,
industry, and commerce. In this Study it would be out of proportion
to embark on any detailed account of these changes in Turkey, or to
attempt to give even a catalogue of the corresponding contemporary
changes in other Islamic countries. We must content ourselves with
taking a glance at the revolutions in the two fields of Religion and
Economics.

In Turkey and other Islamic countries in the second quarter of the
twentieth century of the Christian Era, the psychological effects of the
process of secularization were more disturbing than they had been in
the Western World 250 years earlier, and this for two reasons. In the first
place, in the Islamic World the change did not arise spontaneously from
within but was forced upon the Islamic Society, with a vehemence
proportionate to the obstinacy and pertinacity of the resistence to it, by
the cumulative effects of an encounter with an alien civilization. In the
second place, the change was not foreshadowed and facilitated in the
Islamic World, as it had been in Western Christendom, by a traditional
distinction between the institutions of Church and State and between
a religious and a secular side of life. The texture of Islamic life was a
seamless web in which it was hard to distinguish threads that could be
labelled specifically ‘religious’ and still harder to pluck such threads out
without tearing the whole fabric to pieces.

For these two reasons the bouleversement caused by secularization in

y See Toynbee, A. J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1925, vol. i (London 1927,
Milford), pp. 1-81; Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M .-.Survey of International Affain,
J928 (London 1929, Milford), pp. 206-13.

* See Toynbee and Boulter, Surt'ey, r 9 2S , PP- 200-2.

J See ibid., pp. 216-34, and the present Study, V. vi. 67-68.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 267

Islamic countries was extreme, and its most shattering effects were in the
sphere of private life. The extrication of the Turkish state from the toils
of Islam—revolutionary though this process of disestablishment was 1 2 * —
did not create acute personal problems of the kind that were presented
to the intelligentsia by the elimination of Islam from education, and to
the peasantry by the suppression of Islamic religious orders in Turkey
through three administrative decrees of the 2nd September, 1925. The
religious and cultural life of the Turkish peasantry in Anatolia had
drawn its nourishment from the affiliation of villages to dervish religious
houses;* and the sudden spiritual vacuum which the suppression of the
religious orders produced throughout the Anatolian country-side’ was
not adequately filled by the gradual spread of primary education through
the arduous process of building village schools and training village
schoolmasters.

As for the economic revolution, the Turkish Nationalists were con¬
fronted here with the double task of industrializing an agricultural
country and employing as their instrument for accomplishing this revolu¬
tionary change a community that had previously lived aloof from
precisely those activities that were the distinctive features of the
Modern Western way of life. Under a millet system 4 that had articulated
the population of the Ottoman Empire into geographically intermingled
communities which, in Western terms, were a cross between nationali¬
ties and occupational groups, the members of the Muslim millet had
been peasants, soldiers, clerics, and civil servants, but had left it to the
members of the Orthodox Christian, the Gregorian Monophysitc
Christian, and the Jewish millet to supply the requisite complement of
shopkeepers, merchants, and artisans; and the lines of this established
division of labour had still been followed in the earlier stages of the
process of Westernization. The pursuit of an exotic Frankish technology
had been left to the ra'iyeh, while a Muslim intelligentsia had concen¬
trated its efforts on mastering the Modern Western arts of war, medicine,
law, and administration. Hence in a.d. 1922, when all but a fraction of
the Greek and Armenian minority in Turkey fled the country and was
eventually replaced by Turks expatriated from ex-Ottoman territories
in Rumelia, Turkey found herself suddenly deprived, by her own voli¬
tion, of the inadequate force of native Western-trained technicians that
she had hitherto possessed 5 —and this at a moment when her nationalist

1 The successive abolitions of the Sultanate and the Caliphate in Turkey have been
noticed in this Study in VI. vii. 24-25. Some account of subsequent measures by which the
process was carried to completion in Turkey between the years a.d. 1924 and a.d. 1928
will he found in Toynbee and Boulter, Survey of International Affairs , 1928, pp. 206-8.

2 For the importance of this network of relations, see Birgc, J. K.: The Btktashi Order
of Dervishes (London 1937, Luzac), esp. pp. S 7 - 58, p. 64, n. 4, and pp. 211-12.

’ The first blow at the religious orders had been struck by Sultan Mahmfld II. After
his destruction of the Janissaries in A.p. 1826, he started a general inquisition into, and
proscription of, the Bektaahi Order, with which the Janissary Corps, as well as the Ana¬
tolian peasantry, had been affiliated (Birgc, op. cit., p. 77). Bektashism survived under¬
ground; began to publish literature openly in A.D. 1869, in the liberal atmosphere
created by the ‘New 'Osmanli' movement; went underground again under the auto¬
cratic regime of ‘Abd-al-Hamld (a.d. 1877-1908); and came out into the open again
between a.d. 1908 and a.d. 1925 (Birgc, op. cit., pp. 78-81).

4 Sec pp. 184-6, above.

* In Smyrna in April 1923, on the morrow of the catastrophe which had precipitated

268 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

leaders were giving the word for a forced march towards the ambitious
goal of a thorough-going Westernization of Turkish economic life.

Mustafa Kemal met this crisis by the ‘kill-or-cure’ expedient of
teaching the child to swim by throwing it into water where it was out
of its depth, and there was perhaps no department of his all-embracing
programme of Westernization in which the value and efficacity of the
Rumeliot dictator’s personal driving-force were more signally vindi¬
cated by the experience of the next quarter of a century. In the autumn
of a . d . 1948, when the Republic of Turkey was celebrating the twenty-
fifth anniversary of its establishment on the 29th October, 1923, the
Turkish people’s success in acquiring the technical keys to Modern
Western Man’s material power could be measured most pertinently by
the extent to which the simplest forms of characteristically Modern
Western skill had become familiar to the masses. Statistics of mechanics
and foremen were more significant in this context than statistics of
engineers and managers ; and, on this test, the Turks in a.d. 1952 had no
reason to be dissatisfied with their achievement so long as they were
comparing it with their own past deficiency in this field and not with
the target set them, for their future exertions, by the contemporary
achievements of the Soviet Union and the Western World. 1

Russia's Competition with the West for an Ascendancy over the Islamic
World

The whole-heartedness and effectiveness of the Westernizing move¬
ment in Turkey in its fourth bout might, in itself, have been taken as pre¬
sumptive evidence that, by the middle of the twentieth century of the
Christian Era, the Western way of life had made permanent converts,
not only of the Ottoman Turks, but of all other Muslim peoples, apart
from a minority—amounting perhaps to 25 million out of a total of
probably more than 250 million Muslims alive at this time 2 —who,
willy nilly, were then following the Communist way of life as citizens

b wholesale exodus from Turkey of the Greek and Armenian ra’fyth, the writer of this
Study had successive interviews with the managers of the two railways of which Smyrna
was the terminus, and was informed by each of his interlocutors that, at the moment of
the catastrophe, he had lost overnight 90 per cent, of his personnel and had had to keep
his trains running, as best he could, with an intake, all in one moment, of that over¬
whelmingly high percentage of unskilled labour. The explanation was that these two
railways in Turkey had been built, owned, and managed by a French and a British
private company, and had each recruited almost the whole of its staff, apart from a tiny
Frankish contingent, from non-Turkish natives of the country’. The sudden exodus of
the rai'yeh thus put these two railways in a quandary from which they might have failed
to extricate themselves if they had not been assisted by the military engineers of the
Turkish Anny—whose technical training was the outstanding exception to the rule,
still prevailing at the time, that to be a Turk and a Muslim was synonymous with being
innocent of all acquaintance with Modern Western technique.

1 The writer and his wife spent the month of November 1948 in Turkey as guests of
the Turkish Government, and during a week out of this month they were travelling by
road from Ankara to Adana via Yozgat, Chorum, Merzifun, Amasiyeh, Toqat, Sivas,
Qayaari, and Nijjdeh. They were impressed by the number and resourcefulness of the
lorry-drivers whom they passed on the road, and by the keenness of both the instructors
and the pupils at the provincial polytechnic at Nigdch. If Midhat Pasha could have
returned to life to see that sight, he would assuredly have felt that his own life-work
had not been in vain.

* The total Muslim population of the World was estimated to have been 24a millions
in a.d. 1929 according to Massignon, L.: Annuaire du Monde Mutulman, 3rd ed. (Paris
1930, Leroux), pp. 479-S0.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 269

of the Soviet Union. Though the Ottoman Turks were now truculently
reckoning themselves as Europeans and dissociating their country from
the Middle East, their fellow Muslims were testifying, by their flatter¬
ing imitations of Atatvirk’s radical Westernizing policy, that Turkey’s
prestige had never stood higher in their eyes. 1 In short, in the Islamic
World it had come to seem likely that the people’s vote would now be
cast for Westernization in so far as the question of cultural allegiance
remained a matter of free choice; but it was clear that the issue would
depend, not entirely on the will of the people directly concerned, but
partly also on a trial of strength between a Western and a Russian
World which encircled the Islamic World between them.

The tension of this Russo-Occidental tug-of-war for ascendancy over
the Islamic World had been heightened since a.d. 1774 by a progressive
enhancement of the Islamic World’s importance in two respects—as a
source of key commodities and as a channel of key communications.

The Islamic World embraced the homelands of three out of the four
primary civilizations of the Old World; and the agricultural wealth
which those now extinct societies had once wrested from the previously
intractable valleys of the Lower Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the
Indus had been increased in Egypt and the Panjab, and been partially
restored in ‘Iraq, by the application of Modern Western methods of
water-control. The principal addition, however, to the Islamic World’s
economic resources had been made by the discovery and economic
utilization of subterranean deposits of mineral oil in regions which had
never been of any outstanding agricultural value. The natural 'gushers’,
which, in a pre-Islamic Age, had been turned to religious account by
Zoroastrian piety to keep alight a perpetual flame in honour of the holi¬
ness of Fire, had been noted in a.d. 1723 by the prospector’s eye of Peter
the Great as a potential economic asset; 2 and, though some 150 years
had still to pass before an intuition of genius was confirmed by a com¬
mercial exploitation of the Baku oil field, the fresh discoveries, which
followed in rapid succession during the next hundred years after that,
showed that Baku was only one link in a golden chain stretching north¬
westwards to Grozhny and south-eastwards through 'Iraqi Kurdistan
and Persian Bakhtiyaristan and the Bahrayn Islands into once reputedly
valueless peninsular Arabian territories which uninformed early-
twentieth-century Western diplomatists had carved up on the map as
light-heartedly as uninformed nineteenth-century American politicians
had paid off the remnants of American Indian peoples deported from
Georgia with apportionments of then reputedly valueless land well

1 The shock given to Indian Muslim susceptibilities, in particular, by the Turkish
Republic’s abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate on the 3rd March, 1924, had not per¬
manently alienated the non-Turkish Muslims from Turkey. Its effects had been quickly
obliterated by the Mat of a success that had justified AtatQrk’s impious audacity in the
event; and the very disdain with which the Turks, in this chapter of their history, were
inclined to treat their fellow Muslims perhaps increased these poor relations' respect
for their now pointedly distant Turkish kinsfolk. The Arabs of Syria and ‘Iraq, who
were the Turks' nearest Muslim neighbours, could not forget that they had been under
Turkish rule for four hundred years before the Ottoman Empire had gone into dissolu¬
tion in a . d . 1918, and that, in the next chapter of Islamic history, the defeated Turk*
had maintained their independence while the ‘liberated’ Arabs had merely exchanged
one alien master for another. 1 See II. ii. 278-9.

270 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
beyond the Mississippi. 1 By the middle of the twentieth century the oil
fields of Kuwayt and Sa'udI Arabia had begun to take the shine out of
the cotton fields of Egypt as it had been taken out of the cotton fields of
Georgia by the oil fields of Oklahoma; and Russia, Great Britain,
France, and—last but not least—the United States had already appro¬
priated all but the North Persian slice of a fabulously rich Middle
Eastern oil-cake.

The geographical results of this scramble for oil had produced a tense
political situation, since Russia’s slice of the cake in the Caucasus and
the Western Powers’ slices in Persia and the Arab countries were within
point-blank range of one another, while the British and French slices
had come to be only less important in the economy of Western Europe
than the Russian slice was in the economy of the Soviet Union. 2

This tension was increased by the revival of the Islamic World’s im¬
portance as a node of oecumenical communications. The shortest routes
between Russia and a circum-Atlantic Western World on the one side
and India, South-East Asia, Indonesia, China, and Japan on the other
side all traversed Islamic ground, waters, or air; and on the route-map,
as on the oil-map, the Soviet Union and the Western Powers were
at dangerously close quarters. In a.d. 1952, American, British,
French, and Dutch routes from the Atlantic via the Red Sea or the
Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific were flanked on the
north-cast by Russian outposts in Bulgaria, Transcaucasia, and Trans-
caspia, while ‘the soft under-belly’ of the Soviet Union in the Ukraine
and the Caucasus could be commanded, at still closer range, from the
south by enemy outposts in a Turkey and a Greece over which the
President of the United States had declared a virtual protectorate on
the 12th March, 1947, and in a Persia whose name had been added to
those of Greece and Turkey in this context by the American Secretary
of State on the 17th March, 1949. A Baku oil field which supplied the
needs of the greater part of the Volga Basin via the Caspian Sea lay
within a few miles of the Russo-Persian frontier.

The military and political awkwardness of this geographical situation
had been accentuated by a shift in Russia’s centre of gravity since the
end of the Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74 which had been compar¬
able in magnitude to the shift in the United States' centre of gravity

1 This incident in the history of the United States has been noticed above on p. 36,
n. r.

* In a.d. 1951—between the date in A.D. 1949 when this passage had been written
and the date in a.d. 1952 when it was being revised for the press—the mounting pres¬
sure of Persian national feeling had achieved the expulsion of the Anglo-Iranian Petro¬
leum Company from the oil-field in Bakhtiyaristan and from the refineries and wharves
at 'Abbidan. This outcome of a local collision between the Weaterailing political ideo¬
logy of an Islamic people and the economic enterprise of a Western people in this pro¬
vince of Dar-al-Islim had thrown into Russia’s lap two fine gift-parcels of unearned
politico-military increment. In depriving Great Britain of the oil from the South Persia
field it had diminished, to that extent, the Atlantic Community’s economic, financial,
and military power; and, in depriving Persia of the royalties on an alien Western com¬
mercial company’s profits, it had dried up the previously richest source of Persian public
revenue and national income and had thereby aggravated the economic and social ills
from which Persia was already suffering. Considering the invidious width of the gulf,
in Persia, between the respective standards of living of a tiny dominant minority and a
miserable agricultural proletariat, this fresh turn of an economic screw in Persia could
hardly fail to bring grist to the political mill of Communism.

THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 271

since her declaration of her independence in a . d . 1776. Within that

J .eriod of a century and three-quarters, the replacement of hunters by
armers and industrial workers between the Appalachian Mountains and
the Pacific coast of North America had been emulated in the Old World
in the replacement of Nomads and wild highlanders by farmers and
industrial workers in the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe and
in the Caucasus; and this ci-devant north-western fringe of the Islamic
World, which had been economically all but virgin soil before its
annexation by Russia between the years a . d . 1774 and a . d . 1864, had
since become the Soviet Union’s economic heart. This rapid conjuring
into existence of a new world opening on to the northern and eastern
shores of the Black Sea, with the whole of the Soviet Union for its hinter¬
land, had created—or, in more accurate terms, re-created—a question
concerning the control of the Straits leading out of the Black Sea into
the Aegean which had been dormant so long as the Black Sea had been
an ‘Ottoman lake’; and the coincidence in date between Russia’s
acquisition of a coastline on the Black Sea and the Western Powers’ re¬
opening of the short route between the Western World and India had
started a political game of naughts and crosses 1 in which Russia found
herself perpetually being thwarted by a Western player who in one
round might call herself the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, in another
round Great Britain, in another Germany, and in another the United
States, but who betrayed a consistently Western identity by persisting,
through all these metamorphoses, in making moves that kept Russia in
check.

On the 12th March, 1947, when President Truman gave Russia notice
that the United States had taken over the Western player's role, the

S ime had become an exasperating one from a Russian standpoint, since
ussia’s objective remained unattained while her stake in the game had
been steadily increasing in value. In a.d. 1774 the Empress Catherine
had reasonably expected to live to take the short and logical steps from
Azov to Constantinople and Gallipoli; yet in a.d. 1947 these keys to
Russia’s Pontic front-door were still in non-Russian hands; and, though
since a.d. 1944 the Russian Army had been astride the Balkan Range,
on Constantinople’s Bulgarian threshold, 2 Soviet statesmen could
hardly forget that other Russian armies had pushed their way still closer
to Constantinople in a.d. 1829 and a.d. 1878 without having managed
on either occasion to seize a prize that had then lain so nearly within
their grasp. Meanwhile, the vulnerability of Russia’s new vital organs in
the Ukraine and the Caucasus to attack by Western Sea Powers enjoying
a right of way into the Black Sea had been demonstrated on three
occasions: in the Crimean War (gerebatur a.d. 1853-6); in a.d. 1878,
when the exposure of a victorious Russian army’s Pontic flank to the

« Compare the power game known as 'Lengthways and crossways’ (Uung-hiy)
which was played between the contending parochial states of a Sinic World in the last
phase of their fratricidal warfare with one another (see Franke, O.: Geschichtc des
Chintsischen Reiches, vol. i (Berlin 1930, de Gruyter), p. 193).

» The Soviet Union had compelled Bulgaria to transfer her allegiance to her from
Germany on the 9th September, 1944. when Russian troops had entered Bulgaria from
the Dobruja.

272 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
possibility of an attack by the British Navy had enabled the Western
Powers to convert the Treaty of San Stefano into the Treaty of Berlin;
and in a.d. 1918-20, when the Western Powers had prolonged the
resistance in Russia to the establishment of the Bolshevik regime by
conveying munitions, via the Straits, to the ‘White’ Russian armies of
Generals Denikin and Wrangcl. On each of these occasions, British sea
power had been able to attack or threaten Russia at a vital point thanks
to a command of the passage through the Straits; and, when President
Truman enunciated his doctrine in a.d. 1947, the Soviet Government
must have had these precedents in mind—even though they might hope
that, if occasion arose, the passage of the Straits could now be denied to
the American Navy by a Soviet Air Force operating from Bulgarian
bases.

In these circumstances the future of the Islamic World, as well as that
of a non-Russian Orthodox Christendom, remained unpredictable at
the time of writing.

5. The Modern West and the Jews

The Peculiarities of the Western Province of a Jewish Diaspora's Domain

Whatever might be the ultimate general verdict of Mankind on the
Western Civilization in the modern chapter of its history, it was already
manifest mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian Era,
some 450 years after the beginning of this epoch, that Modern Western
Man had branded himself with two particular marks of lasting infamy
by the commission of two crimes that were indelibly inscribed on his
record. One of these crimes was the shipping of Negro slaves from
Africa to labour on plantations in the New World; 1 the other was the

1 The encounter between the white-skinned founders of the Western Society and the
dark-skinned members of primitive societies whom these Whites had conscripted by
force into the Western Society’s ranks during the modern chapter of Western history
had a generic affinity with the encounters between the representatives of different
civilizations that are the subject of the present Part of this Study, and not least with the
encounter between Western Christendom and Jewry.

Like the feelings of Gentile Westerners about the Jews in their midst, the feelings of
White Westerners about the Negroes in their midst were associated with an awareness
of certain differences in physique between a dominant majority and a penalized minority,
but there was conclusive evidence that these feelings of antipathy were not in either case
an automatic psychic reaction to a visual perception of distinctive physical traits. The
feelings aroused in a Western Gentile psyche by the sight of an Armcnoid nose on
the face of a Jew were not aroused by the sight of a nose of the same configuration on the
face of a Turk (and this physiognomy was common among the Turks as well as among
the Jews, since it had been communicated to the population of Palestine by Indo-
European-speaking Hittitc immigrants from Anatolia and not by Semitic-speaking
Israelite immigrants from Arabia). This showed that the Western Gentile’s antipathy
towards the Jew was excited, not by a physical difference, but by social and cultural
differences which had come to be symbolized by a physical difference when the
Western Gentile encountered the Armcnoid physiognomy in a Jew, though the same
physiognomy could be encountered by the same Westerner without producing
on him the same psychological effect when he met it in a Turkish representative
of an Iranic Muslim Society towards which the Western World’s attitude was different
from its attitude towards Jewry. The evidence likewise showed that the White
Westerner’s antipathy towards the Negro was not an automatic effect of a physical
difference in pigmentation and in odour. A White inhabitant of the Southern States of
the United States who would have objected to the propinquity of one of his Negro
fellow citizens as a fellow passenger in a pullman car felt no repugnance at being waited
upon by a Negro attendant in the same car at equally close quarters; the Negro physique

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 273
extermination of a Jewish diaspork in the European homeland of Western
Christendom; and these two atrocities had one horrifying common
feature. In both of them a primaeval wickedness and cruelty that were
innate in Human Nature had been mated with a capacity for planning
and execution that could have been exhibited only by a technologically
mature civilization; and this shocking combination of technological
maturity with moral depravity distinguished these cold-blooded Modern
Western crimes from the outrages committed by Primitive Man, which,
humanly sinful though they too were, still had in them something of the
innocence of a predator)' Pre-Human Nature as exhibited in the tiger
or the shark. 1

It was, of course, true that the responsibility for these two revolting
Modern Western crimes was not shared in equal proportions by all
members of the Modem Western Society. The Judas share of the crime
against the African Negroes lay on the heads of the English and their
colonists on the eastern seaboard of North America; the Judas share of
the crime against the Jews lay on the heads of the Spaniards, Portuguese,
and Germans. Yet these direst criminals had, after all, been eminent
exponents of the Western Civilization of their day; and their over¬
whelming guilt was a salutarily terrifying reminder of the truth that
Civilization was no permanent transfiguration of the essence of Human
Nature, but was merely a brittle ‘cake of custom’ 2 precariously plastered
over the crater of a live spiritual volcano, where it was at the mercy of

E nnial eruptions of Original Sin. In the casting up of the Western
ety’s final account, it was conceivable, no doubt, that these particular
English, American, Spanish, Portuguese, and German entries on the
debit side might be more than balanced by other entries to Western
Man’s credit; but it could already be forecast that the eventual summing-
up would give no warrant for the pharisaical complacency to which
Modern Western Man had been prone—especially during the quarter of
a millennium between the end of the Modern Western Wars of Religion
and the outbreak of the First World War.

The tragic outcome of the encounter between the Western World and
Jewry—a tragedy which eventually numbered the Palestinian Arabs

was not offensive to a White Southerner in a Negro whose profession stamped him as a
menial; and there were Whites who would have been shocked to sec lawful wedlock
made legal between persons of different colour without being shocked at seeing White
men cohabiting with coloured concubines.

This evidence shows that in the relation between White Westerners and Negroes, as
in the relation between Gentile Westerners and Jews, the stumbling-block was a differ¬
ence, not of race, but of social standing and of culture. All the same, the encounter
between the Modem West and the Negroes falls outside the scope of the present Part
of this Study, since, at the time when the Negroes were smitten bv the Western World's
impact, they were not the representatives of a civilization (in the sense in which the
term is used in this work), but were still in the primitive state of culture; and even this
primitive social heritage was lost by those Negroes who were shipped to the New World
as slaves. The history of the relations between Negroes and White Westerners is thus
part of the domestic history of the Western World. It has been touched upon in II. ii.
218-20 and in V. v. 153 and 168.

1 ‘Funded civilisation' makes ‘the savage of Civilisation more terrible than the savage
of Barbarism’ (Meadows, T. T.: The Chinese and their Rebellions .... to which is added
An Essay on Civilisation and its Present State in the East and West (London >856, Smith
Elder), p. 518).

1 Bagchot, W.: Physics and Politics, 10th ed. (London 1894, Kegan Paul), pp. 27
and 35, quoted in II. i. 192.

274 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
among its innocent victims—was the consequence of an interplay be¬
tween Original Sin and a particular conjunction of social circumstances,
and the first step towards an understanding of the tragedy was to in¬
quire how far these circumstances accounted for it.

Jewry, in the form in which it collided with Western Christendom,
was certainly an exceptional social phenomenon, but it was also certainly
not unique. Jewry was exceptional in being a fossilized relic of a civiliza¬
tion that was extinct in every other shape. 1 The Syriac parochial state of
Judah, from which Jewry was derived, had been one of a number of
Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaean, and Philistine communities into which
a Syriac Society had articulated itself in its growth stage; but, whereas
Judah’s sister communities, including her next-of-kin, Israel, had lost
their identity, as well as their statehood, as a result of fatal injuries which
the Syriac Society had sustained from successive collisions with its
Babylonic and Hellenic neighbours, the same challenges had stimulated
the Jews to create for themselves a new mode of corporate existence in
which they managed to survive the loss of their state and their country
by preserving their identity as a diaspora among an alien majority
and under alien rule. This exceptionally successful Jewish reaction to
a challenge to which most Syriac communities had succumbed was
not, however, unique; for the Jewish diaspora in the Islamic and the
Christian World had an historical counterpart in the Parsee diaspora
in India, which was another fossilized relic of the same extinct Syriac
Society.

The Parsees were survivors of Iranian converts to the Syriac Civiliza¬
tion who had given the Syriac Society a universal state in the shape of
the Achaemcnian Empire; the Parsee, like the Jewish, community was
the monument of a victorious will to outlive the loss of state and country;
and the Parsees, too, had suffered this loss as a result of successive
collisions between the Syriac World and neighbouring societies. Like
the Jews during the three centuries ending in a.d. 135, the Parsees’
Zoroastrian Iranian forefathers had sacrificed themselves in an un¬
successful attempt to eject an intrusive Hellenism by force from a
conquered Syriac World; and the penalty for failure, which had been
inflicted on the Jews in the first and second centuries of the Christian
Era by the Hellenic Civilization’s Roman champions, had been inflicted
on the Zoroastrian Iranians in the seventh century by Primitive Muslim
Arab barbarian invaders of the Roman and Sasanian empires who were
completing the Zoroastrian Iranians’ uncompleted task by liberating the
Syriac World west of the Euphrates from an Hellenic ascendancy that
by this date had persisted there for nearly a thousand years. In these
similar crises in their history the Jews and the Parsees had preserved
their identity by the same creative feat of improvising new institu¬
tions and specializing in new activities. They had found in the elaboration
of their heritage of religious law a new social cement to replace a political
bond that had perished with their state, and they had survived the
disastrous economic consequences of being uprooted from the land of
their fathers by developing, in the land of their exile, a special skill in

* For this phenomenon of ‘fosailization’, sec I. i. 35, 51, and 90-92.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 275

commerce and other urban business in lieu of a husbandry which these
landless refugees were no longer able to pursue. 1

Nor were these Jewish and Parsee diasporas the only fossils that an
extinct Syriac Society had left behind it; for, before the Primitive Muslim
Arabs succeeded in carrying out the task of ejecting Hellenism in which
the Jews and the Zoroastrians had failed, a second series of abortive
attempts to attain the same objective had been made by champions of a
submerged Syriac Society within the bosom of the Christian Church;
this second unsuccessful Syriac counter-offensive in its turn had precipi¬
tated a number of ‘fossils in diaspora’ in the shape of the Nestorian and
Monophysite Christian Churches; and these scattered Christian com¬
munities, like their Jewish and Parsee forerunners, had preserved their
identity through a devotion to distinctive religious rites and a proficiency
in commerce and finance. Nor, again, was the Syriac Society the only
civilization in which communities that had lost their statehood and had
been uprooted from the soil had succeeded in surviving through a com¬
bination of ecclesiastical discipline with business enterprise. In the main
body of Orthodox Christendom under an alien Ottoman regime, a
subjugated Greek Orthodox Christian community had been partially
uprooted from the soil, and these Greek Orthodox Christian deracines
had responded to this ordeal by accommodating themselves to changes in
their economic activities and their social organization on lines which
carried them far along the road towards becoming a diaspora of the same
type as the Gregorian Armenian, Jacobite Syrian, and Coptic Egyptian
Monophysites and the pre-Christian stratum of Syriac 'fossils’ repre¬
sented by the Jews and the Parsces.

Indeed, the millet system of the Ottoman Empire* was merely a
systematically organized version of a communal structure of society
which had grown up spontaneously in the Syriac World after the Syriac
peoples had been inextricably intermingled with one another by the
malice of an Assyrian militarism that had not been content to pulverize
its victims but had scattered the survivors abroad in order to make sure
that they should never find a chance of retrieving their political fortunes.
The consequent rearticulation of Society into a network of geographically
intermingled oecumenical communities in place of a patchwork of geo¬
graphically segregated parochial states had been inherited from the
Syriac Society by its Iranic and Arabic Muslim successors and had
subsequently been imposed by 'Osmanli Iranic Muslim empire-builders
on a prostrate Orthodox Christendom which they had subjugated by the
employment of Assyrian methods of barbarism.

In this historical perspective it is manifest that the Jewish diaspori
encountered by a Western Christendom, so far from being a unique
social phenomenon, was one among a number of surviving representa¬
tives of a long established and widely distributed species of community.
This species had come to be the standard type in the Syriac World after
* the culminating paroxysm of Assyrian militarism; it had always been the

1 For example* of the stimulus of penalizations on the economic and other planes,
see II. ii. 108-59.

* For an account of this system of communal organization, see pp. 184-6, above.

276 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
standard type in the two Islamic societies that were the Syriac Society’s
offspring, and it had also been the standard type in the main body of
Orthodox Christendom during the period of the Ottoman regime. The
area over which the Jewish diaspora had spread itself included, of
course, the domains of the Islamic societies as well as those of the
Christendoms, and, if we think of this area as being the oecumenical
domain of the Jewish ‘millet’ and look at it, through Jewish eyes, as a
unity, we shall perceive that—at least in the Early Modern Age, before
the Ottoman Orthodox Christians had transferred their cultural
allegiance from their ‘Osmanli masters to their Western neighbours—
the millet system which was exemplified in the social organization of the
J ewish diaspora was the standard type of social structure in three out of the
five provinces of Jewry’s empire. Of the remaining two provinces we can
leave the Russian Orthodox Christian province out of the reckoning; for
there were hardly any Jews in Russian Orthodox Christendom outside
‘the Jewish Pale’ of the Russian Empire, and, while it was true that a

2 'ority of the Jewish population of the World was concentrated in ‘the
before its devastation in the first and second world wars, the Pale had
to be reckoned as falling within the Western and not the Russian Christian
province of a Jewish Oikoumeni, since the Jewish diaspora in the Pale had
originated in Western Christendom and had drifted into this originally
Russian territory' in the wake of medieval Polish and Lithuanian Western
Christian conquerors. 2 In effect, therefore, the millet system of social
organization was the rule in three out of four effectively occupied
provinces of Jewry's oecumenical empire, and was exceptional in the
Western Christian province alone.

This conclusion raises the question whether the peculiar social setting
of the tragic encounter between Jewry and Western Christendom may
not be found to consist in peculiarities on the Western at least as much
as on the Jewish side; and, when we put this question, we can see that
the course of Western history was indeed peculiar in at least three
respects that are all relevant to the history’of Jewish-Occidental relations.
In the first place the Western Society articulated itself into a patchwork
of geographically segregated communities each occupying exclusively a
separate local territory’ of its own, instead of articulating itself into a net¬
work of geographically intermingled communities on the pattern prevail¬
ing in the other provinces of the Jewish World. In the second place the
Western Society transformed itself in the course of its history from an
ultra-rural society of peasants and landlords 3 into an ultra-urban society

* The history of this western fringe of Russian Orthodox Christendom, which had
been overrun by Western Christian conquerors in the fourteenth century and had been
reannexed to the unconquered core of Russia between a.d. 1772 and a.d. 1945, has been
touched upon on pp. 126-0, above, and is dealt with again on pp. 398-400, below.

2 See II. ii. 241-2. Dr. James Parkes here makes the comment that the Jewish com¬
munity in the Pale was not wholly of West European provenance. There were elements
in it that had come from the opposite side of the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian
Steppe; and these elements included Qara’im as well as orthodox Talmudists from the
Crimea who were believed to be of Khazar origin (see II. ii. 410-1).

1 Christopher Dawson points out, in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (Lon¬
don 1950, Sheed and Ward), pp. 56-57. that the Western Christian peasant’s life and
work were restored to honour in this age by a rustic Benedictine monasticism. See also
the present Study, III. iii. 266.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 277
of artisans and bourgeois. In the third place this nationalist-minded and
middlc-class-mindedlattcr-day Western Society emerged surprisingly and
suddenly, at the close of the fifteenth century of the Christian Era, from the
relative obscurity of the medieval chapter of its history and came rapidly
to overshadow all the rest of the traversable and habitable surface of the
planet. Each of these three peculiar features of Western life and history
made its effect on the fortunes of that unlucky fraction of a Jewish diaspora
that happened to have wandered into this Western Ultima Thule of a pre-
da Gaman World whose centre-point was, not Portugal, but Farghanah.

The Persecution of the Peninsular Jews under a Visigothic Catholic
Christian Regime

The inner connexion between Antisemitism and the Western Christian
ideal of a homogeneous community embracing all the inhabitants of a
particular territory reveals itself clearly in the history of the Jewish
diaspora in the Iberian Peninsula.

Though the ideal of homogeneity was inherited by Western Christen¬
dom from a converted Hellenic World whose inhabitants had latterly
come to be uniformly Roman in their political status and uniformly
Christian in their religion, apart from the Jews , 1 the conquest of the
lion’s share of a dissolving Catholic Christian Roman Empire’s western
provinces by Arian Christian Teutonic barbarian war-bands reopened
the question of a nascent Western Society’s future social structure by
introducing the germs of a millet system into it. The conquerors
cherished their Teutonic communal law and their Arian communal
religion as distinctive badges which served to mark them off from their
Catholic Roman subjects , 2 and another social effect of the conquest was
a hardening of the distinction between freemen and slaves, which had
been softened by a vein of humanity in the Roman Law of the Imperial
Age. In the Roman Empire’s Teutonic barbarian successor-states the
servile element in the population came to be marked off from the free
element more sharply than before, through changes for the worse in both
their treatment and their status . 2 Here were the rudiments of a society
articulated along horizontal instead of vertical lines into geographically
intermingled but socially segregated communities on the millet pattern.
In a society of this structure a Jewish diaspora would not strike a jarring
note; and in fact there is no evidence of any serious collision between
the Jewish diaspora in the Iberian Peninsula and the successor-state of
the Roman Empire that had been established there by the Visigoths so
long as the Western Christian body social in the Visigothic dominions

1 A toleration of the Jewish diaspori which went against the grain of Judaic intoler¬
ance in the ithos of Christianity was part of the Christian Roman Empire’s political
heritage from an antecedent pagan rdgimc. The pagan Roman authorities’ forbearance
towards Judaism had been a surprising exception to their general rule of repressing
Greek and Oriental missionary religions. Judaism had aggravated the Dionysiac and
Christian offence of making proselytes by lending itself to a political militancy of which
both Bacchus-worship and Christianity were innocent. Yet a pagan Roman Government
had accorded to the Jews a religious toleration which it had denied to the Bacchants
(sec II. ii. 216) and to the Christians. 4 Sec V. v. 227-9 »nd VI. vii. 286-8.

» For one local manifestation of this general tendency, see Ziegler, A. K.: Church and
Stale in Visigothic Spain (Washington, D.C. 1930, Catholic University of America),

pp. 170-6.

278 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
continued to be internally articulated on horizontal lines into a Gothic
Arian millet and a Roman Catholic millet that was sharply divided in
its turn into a free and a servile social stratum.

In the course of the sixth and seventh centuries, however, the gulf
between the slave and the free community in Visigothia was diminished,
and the gulf between the Roman and the Gothic community was com¬
pletely bridged, by the cumulative results of a series of local measures 1
which reflected an oecumenical tendency in the Western Christendom of
that age to revert from an embryonic millet system to the Hellenic tradi¬
tion of social homogeneity; 2 and, pari passu with this Gleichsclialtung of
the Christian communities, a tension arose in Visigothia between a more
and more thoroughly unified Christian people and a consequently more
and more conspicuously peculiar Jewish millet. The accentuation of this
tension is registered in a series of anti-Jewish enactments of a Judaically
fanatical ferocity 3 that presents a painful contrast to the simultaneously
increasing humanity of the contemporary legislation for protecting slaves

* The first notable breach in the barrier between Roman and Visigoth was the abro¬
gation in the reign of King Leovigild (regnabat a.d. 568-86) of a law, forbidding inter¬
marriage between Romans and barbarians under pain of death, which had been enacted
originally from the Roman side in a.d. 375 in a constitution of the Emperors Valentinian
and Valens and had been incorporated in a.d. 506 into the Visigothic King Alaric II’s
Lex Romana Visigothonm, alias Bteviarium Aland (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 23). The crucial
step was the conversion of King Recared (regnabat a.d. 586-601) from Arianism to
Catholicism in A.D. *87. The Visigothic community followed their king’s lead, and the
consequent union of Goths and Romans took institutional shape in a series of eighteen
nations) councils, held at Toledo between the years a.d. 589 and 701 inclusive (ibid.,
p. 3 S). in which a minority of laymen co-operated with a majority of bishops and other
denes in enacting canons that did not deal exclusively with ecclesiastical affairs. The
final step was taken by King Receswinth (regnabat a.d. 649-72) when in a.d. 654 he
abrogated simultaneously the barbarian law under which his Gothic subjects had been
living and the Roman Law under which his Roman subject* had been living, and gave
exclusive legal currency in his dominions to a new Liber Iudiciorum (alias Forum Iudieum),
in which Roman and barbarian elements were blended (ibid., pp. 62-64, and the present
Study, VI. vii. 288). In this new law of the land, which was binding on all the King’s
subjects, the Roman clement was predominant (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 75).

* The decisive steps in this direction were taken by statesmen who were not Visigoths.
The first step, which was the most decisive of all, was the Salian Frank war-lord Clovis’s
conversion from paganism to Catholic Christianity in a.d. 496; the next was the destruc¬
tion of the Arian barbarian successor-states of the Roman Empire in Africa and Italy
by the Emperor Justinian in a.d. 533-52; the third was the conversion of the English
from paganism to Catholic Christianity by Gregory the Great’s missionaries in and after
A.D. 597. If the Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandal instead of the Frankish and English
Teutonic barbarian successor-states of the Roman Empire had set the pattern for the
subsequent development of the structure of the Western Society, Western Christendom
might have become, like the Islamic Society, a hierarchy of millets or, like the Hindu
Society, a hierarchy of castes in which the Arian war-bands would have been the
Kshatriyas and a Catholic clergy the Brahmans.

s Before the beginning of the progressive amalgamation of the Christian communities
in the Visigothic Kingdom, the life of the Jewish dinsporii there had been governed by
the terms of Alaric II’s Lex Romana Visigothorum. Under this code, Jews were forbidden
to attempt to convert Christians to Judaism, to marry Christians, and to buy Christian
slaves; they were excluded from military’ snd civil office without being exempted from
onerous public duties (munera); and they were forbidden to build new synagogues.
They were permitted, however, to keep existing synagogues in repair and to practise
their religion; they were exempted from the transaction of fiscal or other public business
on the sabbath day; and they were allowed a considerable measure of communal auto¬
nomy. ‘The authority of Jewish superiors was acknowledged not only in what concerned
their own religion but also in civil matters. Jews might, if they wished, have recourse
to their own elder* for arbitration’ (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 187, following L.R.V. ii. x, 10).
Thereafter, the position of the Jews in Visigothia deteriorated (though an ever more
savage anti-Jewish legislation seems largely to have remained a dead letter owing to the
venality of the public authorities, including the Crown and the Episcopate, and the

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 279
against their masters' and pauperes against potentiores . 2 ‘The maltreat¬
ment of the Jews in the Visigothic Kingdom was the unfortunate result
of the union between Church and State .’ 3

Though the wealth of the Peninsular Jews and the venality of their
Christian oppressors made the anti-Jewish policy of the Visigothic
Kingdom ‘ridiculously ineffective ’, 4 it is not surprising that the
Visigothic Crown’s Jewish subjects should have retorted to Egica’s

Jews’ command of the resources for paying the necessary bribes). In a.d. 580 the First
Council of Toledo, at King Rccared’s request, reaffirmed anti-Jewish provisions of the
Lex Romana Visigothorum that had fallen into disuse (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 189). King
Siscbut {regnabat A.D. 612-21) gave the Jews a choice between conversion to Christianity
and banishment from the kingdom (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 190, following Isidore of Seville,
Hiitoria Gothorum, 60, and Continuelio Jsidori , 15), but in this he was acting independently
of the Church, and the Fourth Council of Toledo ( sedebat a.d. 633) forbade further com¬
pulsory conversions, though it did not allow Jews already compulsorily converted to
relapse (ibid., pp. 190 and 191). The Sixth Council {sedebat a.d. 638) commended King
Chintila ( regnabat a.d. 636-40) for having forbidden unconverted Jews to remain in the
kingdom and took steps of its own to ensure the effective execution of the King’s ruling
(ibid., p. 192). King Reccswinth ( regnabat a.d. 649-72) attacked the Jews in his royal
message {tomus) to the Eighth Council {tedebat a.d. 653); and, when the Eighth Council
declined to go beyond the limits of the Fourth Council’s anti-Jewish measures, Rece-
swinth widened the breach between Christendom and Jewry in his kingdom by pro¬
mulgating intolerable anti-Jewish legislation of his own in the very year a.d. 654 in which
he completed the closing of the breach between his Roman and his Gothic Catholic
Christian subjects by bringing them under a common law. Reccswinth prohibited the
practice of the Jewish religion under pain of death (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 193, following
Leges Visigothorum, xii. 2. 12, 16, 17). King Erwig {regnabat a.d. 680-7) promulgated
twenty-eight laws against the Jews (L.V. xii. 3. 1-28), which were endorsed by the
Twelfth Council (sedebat A.D. 681); and the third of these laid it down that they must
abjure Judaism within a year under pain—not, now, of death, but of exile and forfeiture
of property (Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 194-5)- King Egica {regnabat a.d. 687-702) tried to cut
the root of the economic power which nad enabled the Jews largely to elude the previous
legislation against them by playing upon the Christian authorities' venality. He in¬
creased the special (axes payable by the Jews and at the same time forbade unconverted
Jews to transact commercial business with Christians or to engage in foreign trade, and
required them to sell to the fiscus any real property that they had acquired from Christ¬
ians (Ziegler op. cit., p. 195, following L.V. xii. 2. t8). The Sixteenth Council {sedebat
A.D. 693) approved Egica’s legislation (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 195).

In this sordid Visigothian tale there is a hidden vein of tragic irony, for, though the
vice of fanaticism acauircd the new name of 'bigotry' from the conspicuousness of the
Visigoths’ practice of it, these Teutonic barbarians were not in fact the first 'bigots’
known to history. The abuse of political power for the inhuman purpose of imposing
on a subject minority a choice between the abandonment of its ancestral religion and the
extreme penalty of banishment or even death had been practised by the Jews against
their Gentile neighbours in Syria seven hundred years before they themselves had been
confronted with the same choice by the Visigoths in the Iberian Peninsula. The earliest
known instance of ’bigotry’ is the compulsory conversion of the conquered Gentiles of
Galilee to Judaism by their Maccabaean Jewish conqueror Alexander Jannacus in the
first quarter of the last century 8.C. (see II. ii. 73. and V. vi. 478 and 499, n. 1); and the
Maccabaean temper was inherited by Christendom from a Jewry that came to be
the principal victim of this Jewish vein in the Christian religion. Jewish ‘Maccabaeanism’
wa 9 not, of course, the sole source of Christian ’Antisemitism’, for ’Antisemitism’ had
been rife in a pre-Christian Hellenic World, at Alexandria and elsewhere, from the
second century B.c. onwards (see Marcus, R.: Antisemitism in the Hellenistic World
(New York 1946, Conference on Jewish Relations)); but the combination of a fanatical
religious intolerance with an antipathy arising from social ar.d economic grievances was
an aggravation of pre-Christian ‘Antisemitism’ into which Christianity was betrayed by
the Judaic, not the Hellenic, clement in its fithos.

1 See Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 176-9. * See ibid., p. 169.

J Ziegler, op. dt., p. 197. The honesty of this verdict delivered by a Modem Western
scholar who was also a priest of the Roman Catholic Church was as impressive as it was
creditable to the author; and Father Ziegler’s honesty is equalled by his acumen. He
points out that the Catholic Visigothia of A.D. 587-7” "’as not, as has sometimes been
supposed, a hierocracy, but was an Erastian state, and that a partnership which was a
boon to the commonwealth was a doubtful blessing for the Church (ibid., pp. 126-33).

4 Ziegler, op. dt., p. 198.

2 8o ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

legislation by conspiring with their co-religionists in North-West Africa
to procure the intervention of the Arabs. The detection of the con¬
spiracy by the Visigothic government in a.d. 694’ and the consequent
reprisals 1 neither gave the Peninsular Jews the coup de grdee nor saved
the Visigothic Kingdom from destruction after the Arabs’ hands had
been freed for a farther westward advance by their definitive conquest
of Carthage from her Roman defenders in a.d. 698; and the Peninsular
Jews survived to sec their intuition justified by five hundred years’
experience of a Muslim regime (vigebat a.d. 711-1212) under which
an autonomous diaspora was not a peculiar people.

The Respite for the Peninsular Jews under Andalusian and Ottoman Muslim
Regimes

The social effect of the Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was
indeed to make the Jewish community at home there again by re¬
establishing the horizontally articulated structure of society that had
prevailed there before the conversion of the Visigoths from Arian to
Catholic Christianity. The metropolitan territory of the Umayyad Arab
Caliphate was Syria, where the millet system of communal organization
had been endemic since the Achaemenian Age; and, before the Primitive
Muslim Arabs had broken through the Roman limes, this indigenous
way of life had already reasserted itself in both Syria and Egypt. The
fifth century of the Christian Era, which had seen the unity of the
Christian society fractured in the western provinces of the Roman
Empire by the imposition of an Arian barbarian ‘ascendancy’ on a

Catholic Roman subject population, had seen it fractured simultaneously
in the eastern provinces by the secession of a Monophysite Syriac sub¬
merged population from a Catholic Roman ‘ascendancy’; and, when in
the seventh century this ‘Mclchite’ regime, as it was nicknamed by the
Imperialists' disaffected Monophysite Christian subjects, was replaced
by a Muslim barbarian ‘ascendancy’, the Umayyad Arab Muslim
successor-state of the Roman Empire reproduced, point for point, the
social structure of the Empire’s Teutonic Arian successor-states in
the West before their annihilation or conversion. 3 The Arab conquest

« Sec Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 121 and 105-6.

1 The Seventeenth Council of Toledo (itdebat a.d. 694) was specially convened by
King Egica to deal with this emergency, and it rose to the occasion. By the eighth canon
of this council, ‘all the Jews were declared enslaved to Christian masters, who were to see
to it that no Jewish rites were practised. Their goods were confiscated to the fiscus, and
their children after attaining the age of seven were to be taken from them and reared
as Christiana’. The Jews of Scptimania were exempted from this sentence at Egica’a
request (ibid., p. 196).

* There was perhaps a possibility that the Arab Muslim conquerors of Syria and
Egypt might have followed the path of the Visigothic Arian Christian conquerors of the
Iberian Peninsula to the length of eventually adopting the Christianity of their subjects
in place of their own distinctive religion. Islam (as would have become evident in that
event) had originated in an Arab barbarian prophet’s attempt to provide his own people
with a counterpart of the Christianity of their neighbours, and Muhammadanism might
have shared the fate of Arius’s Christian heresy. The Umayyad beneficiaries of Muham¬
mad’s political genius were (save for ‘Umar II) as luke-warm in their allegiance to their
official faith as they were susceptible to the culture of the Monophysite Arab ex-wardens
of the Roman Empire’s Syrian limes, whose fraternization with the Umayyads had helped
to make the usurping dynasty’s fortunes. If some Umayyad caliph had abandoned Islam
for Monophysite Christianity, the last chapter of Syriac history might have taken the
same tum as the first chapter of Western history in the Iberian Peninsula.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 281
of the Iberian Peninsula brought the conquerors’ institutions in its
train; and thus, after the Visigoths’ downfall in a . d . 711, the social
organization of the Iberian Peninsula reverted to what it had been before
the Visigoths’ conversion to Catholicism in a . d . 587. A Catholic Christian
population again found itself subject to a barbarian ‘ascendancy’ with a
distinctive communal religion and law of its own; and the substitution
of Muslim Arabs for Arian Christian Goths in the top layer of a now
again horizontally articulated society was wholly to the Peninsular Jews’
advantage, since the Jewish survivors and the Arab liberators of a Syriac
Society whose civilization was their common heritage were drawn to¬
wards one another by a cultural affinity of which there was no more than
a trace in the relations between the Jews and the Arian Christians.

The w’ell-being enjoyed by the Jewish diaspora in the Peninsula under
a Muslim regime did not outlive the Peninsular Muslim Power's collapse;
for the Medieval Catholic Christian barbarian conquerors of the Andalu¬
sian Umayyad Caliphate’s domain were dedicated to that ideal of a
homogeneous Catholic Christian commonwealth that had governed the
policy of the Visigothic barbarian successor-state of the Roman Empire
during the years a . d . 587-711, and, unlike seventh-century Visigothia,
fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal conscientiously carried this fanati¬
cal policy of Gleichschaltung into effect. Between a . d . 1391 and a . d . 1497
the Jewish diaspora in the Peninsula was compelled either to go into
exile or to profess conversion to Catholic Christianity. 1

In the extremity to which they were thus reduced by the abrogation
of the millet system in a province of D§r-al-Isl 3 m that had been annexed
to a Medieval Western Christendom, some of the Peninsular Jews were
saved by being given asylum in an Orthodox Christian World where the
millet system had recently been introduced by Ottoman Muslim con¬
querors. 2 In the commercial centres of an oecumenical empire in which
the rest of Society was organized on the same communal lines, a refugee
Peninsular Jewish diaspora enjoyed a further spell of well-being 3 until,
some four centuries after their transplantation, Rumelia, where the social
climate had been genial for the Jews in the heyday of the Ottoman
regime, was overtaken by the inclement social conditions that had
already frozen the Jews out of the Iberian Peninsula. The Salonican
Sephardim were threatened with catastrophe when the non-Jcwish
millets of the Ottoman Empire, including eventually the ci-devant
Muslim ‘ascendancy’ itself, became converts to the political ideology of
the Western World in the virulently extreme form of Modern Western
Nationalism. 4

The Causes of the Western Christians' Ill-treatment of the Jews

The amenity of being a normal, not a peculiar, social phenomenon was
not the only benefit accruing to an autonomous Jewish diaspori under

1 See II. ii. 244.

* Others found asylum in Holland and at Leghorn (see II. ii. 244, and p. 286, below),

and other* again in North-West Africa. 3 bee II. 11. 244-7.

* The conversion of the ex-Ottoman Orthodox Christian and Muslim peoples to
Modem Western Nationalism has been dealt with on pp. 189-92 and 263-8, above.

282 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Muslim rule. In Dar-al-Islam the Jews’ liberty to live their communal
life in their own way was not precariously dependent on a fortunate
absence of friction thanks to the congruity of this way of life with the
Islamic social environment; it was positively guaranteed by stipulations
of the Islamic Law. The Prophet Muhammad himself had expressly laid
it down in the Qur’an that Jews and Christians were to be allowed to go
on practising their own religions under the protection of the Islamic
state if they submitted to Muslim rule and agreed to pay a differential
tax; 1 and, on the morrow of the Peninsular Jews’ settlement in the
Ottoman Empire, these texts of Islamic holy writ had duly saved the
lives of the Ottoman Padishah’s Christian subjects when their citation
by the Oecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, at the suggestion of
the Shcykh-el-Islam, had deterred Sultan Selim I the Grim from taking
a leaf out of their Spanish Catholic Majesties’ book by unlawfully con¬
fronting his non-Jewish ra'iyeh with the inhuman choice between con¬
version to Islam and death. 1

This toleration of ‘the People of the Book’, which was secured de jure
for Jews and Christians in Dar-al-Isl 5 m, was, of course, accorded de
facto to Jews in Christendom as a rule;* and indeed it would have been
almost prohibitively illogical and invidious for the adherents of a younger
religion to proscribe the practice of an older religion which, according
to the innovators’ own doctrine, had likewise been revealed to Mankind
by the One True God to prepare the way for the definitive revelation
which the younger religion claimed to embody. 4 By a fortunate chance s
the toleration of ‘the People of the Book’ had been expressly enjoined
in the scriptures of an Islam whose adherents might otherwise perhaps
have been tempted into intolerance by their religion’s militant and
domineering 6thos. Conversely it might perhaps have been expected
a priori that the absence of any corresponding injunction in the New
Testament would have been more than made good by the gentle and
unaggressive ethos of Christianity. The New’ Testament had nothing to
say about matters of public policy because the Primitive Christians, un¬
like the Primitive Muslims, were the submissive subjects and not the

1 See II. ii. 245; IV. iv. 225-6 and 630; and V. v. 674, n. 2.

2 See V. v. 706, n. 1, and V. vi. 204-5.

3 The de facto toleration accorded to the Jew* in Christendom was accorded in Dar-al-
Islim to the Zoroastrians and the Hindus through a tacit conferment on them of the
statu# expressly guaranteed to the Jews and the Christians by the Qur’fln.

* This chronological consideration explains why it was that the Christians tolerated
Judaism but not Islam, whereas the Muslims tolerated both Judaism and Christianity.
Dr. James Parkes here notes that the Christian, as well as the Islamic, Church found a
juridical basis for the toleration that it practised. While the Christian Church held that
the divine authority previously attaching to Judaism had been entirely abrogated by
the Incarnation, it nevertheless discovered two grounds for conceding that the Jews in
Christendom’s midst had a right to a continuing survival. In their latter-day distressed
condition they were serving as witnesses to the heinousness of the crime of deicide, and
their survival was guaranteed by St. Paul's assurance that Jewry would be converted in
the fullness of time (see, for example, Rom. x. and xi). In making these findings,
Theology was playing the beau role of serving as the handmaid of Mercy and Loving¬
kindness.

5 The inclusion of any particular ruling in the Medinese stirahs of the Qur’an must
be held to be a matter of chance, since these surahs were a collection of ad hoc rulings
elicited by the day-to-day business that came on to Muhammad’s agenda in his political
role of podesta (to give him the title that this imported dictator would have borne if
Medina had been a Medieval Italian city-state).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 283
masterful rulers of a state. 1 Why was it that the Christians, when they
eventually came into political power, distinguished themselves so
disadvantagcously from their Muslim contemporaries by abusing this
power in their behaviour towards the Jews?

One reason was that in the New Testament the Gospel of Love was
accompanied by a polemical attack on the Pharisees and was consum¬
mated by the story of the Passion of Christ; for these two particular
ingredients in Christianity’s holy writ could be taken by a latter-day
Christian, who had the perverse will so to believe, as evidence that he was
warranted by the New Testament itself in refusing to give the Jews the
benefit of a Christian’s general obligation to love and cherish his fellow
human beings. In persuading the Roman authorities to put the founder
of the Christian Church to death, the Jews in Christian eyes had com¬
mitted a capital offence which was also an unspeakable impiety on the
assumption that the Jews were grievously mistaken in rejecting the
Christians’ claim that the crucified Jesus was an incarnation of the God¬
head. Thus, by a tragically ironical peripeteia , a Passion which, according
to the Christian Church’s theology, was a supreme act of self-sacrifice,
willed, out of love for Mankind, by a God incarnate in a man who was a
Jew, could be taken by professing Christians as a justification for perse¬
cuting latter-day kinsmen of Jesus’ murderers who were consequently
kinsmen of Jesus himself; and the animus shown by the Evangelists in
recording a controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees which was a
family quarrel within the bosom of Jewry, and indeed within the bosom
of Pharisaism itself, could incite Jesus’ latter-day Gentile adherents to
condemn their professed Master’s own religion and community, root
and branch.

An historian, observing this deadly recoil on Jewish heads of the
shedding of Jesus’ blood, might come to the cynical conclusion that, in
gently submitting to be put to death, at his Jewish fellow countrymen’s
instigation, by the Roman authorities, Jesus had involuntarily done his
own people immeasurably greater harm than they had subsequently
suffered at Muhammad’s Gentile hands when this militant prophet had
provided for his landless Meccan followers at Medina by instigating the
massacre and spoliation of the Jewish husbandmen in the Mcdinesc
oasis. To appear as the embarrassing victims of the Founder of Islam
was a much less damaging entry in the record of a Jewish diaspora at the
mercy of a Muslim or a Christian majority than to appear as the execrable
murderers of the Founder of Christianity. And, after all, had not
Muhammad made some considerable amends to the rest of Jewry for
a crime committed by him against the single Jewish community of the
Banu Qurayzah in the single oasis of Yathrib (trucidati a.d. 627) when,
on the occasion of his subsequent conquest of the North Arabian Jewish
oasis of Khaybar (captum a . d . 629), he had given Judaism an abiding
legal guarantee of toleration under Muslim rule by a less maleficent
exercise of the same political power that he had misused in dooming the
Medincsc Jews to destruction?

However that might be, it was attested by History’ that the ethos of
1 On this point, s«e III. iii. 466-72.

z8 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

Christianity had not availed to avert from the heads of the Jewish
diaspora in Western Christendom the catastrophic effects of a provincial
Western Christian political outlook in which a millet looked like an
offensive anomaly. This peculiar inhospitality of Western Christendom
to the Jewish strangers in its midst was aggravated by the peculiar
course of Western Christendom’s economic and social development.

The birthplace of the western Society was an outlying tract of the
Hellenic World where the Hellenic Civilization had broken down at the
turn of the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian Era because, on this
recently and superficially Hellenizcd ground, the- urban culture of
Hellenism had failed to strike root. The superstructure of urban life
that had been erected in the western provinces of the Roman Empire on
primitive agricultural foundations had proved to be an incubus instead
of a stimulus; 1 and, after this exotic Roman-built superstructure had
collapsed under its own weight, the West sank back to the same low
economic level at which it had lain before Hellenism had attempted to
seed itself beyond the Appennincs or across the Tyrrhene Sea. This
peculiar economic handicap with which the Western Society started life
had two consequences which, between them, were bound to make
trouble. In the first place a nascent Western Christendom was invaded
by a Jewish diaspora from an urban Syriac World which found an open¬
ing for making a livelihood in the West by providing a rustic society
with that minimum of commercial experience, skill, and organization
without which even Ruritania could not live, but which Ruritania at that
early stage of her development was incompetent to provide out of her
own resources. 2 In the second place the Western Christian Gentiles’
very ineptitude in business affairs inspired them with a compelling and
abiding ambition to become their own Jews by mastering Jewry’s arts—
for their encounter with the Jewish diaspora, and the spectacle of the
wealth and power that these aliens gained through the performance of
an indispensable social service, was one of the experiences that made
the Western Christians of the Dark Age aware of their economic back¬
wardness and eager to overcome it.

In the course of ages a more and more demonic concentration of
Western Gentile will-power on this Jewish economic objective came to
reap a sensational reward. By the twentieth century of the Christian Era
even the East European rear-guard of the Western peoples’ column of
route in their long march towards the goal of economic efficiency was
going through a metamorphosis that had been achieved a thousand years
earlier by the North Italian and Flemish pioneers in a Western economic
and social movement that might be called with equal appropriateness
either ‘Judaization’ or ‘modernization’. In Western history the sign of
the attainment of this social modernity was the emergence of a Gentile
bourgeoisie whose field of economic enterprise was the same as the
Jewish diaspora’s; and the advent in the West of this modem Gentile
bourgeoisie made for a quarrel there between Gentile and Jew by making
the Jew seem superfluous to the Gentile and the Gentile seem insatiable
to the Jew. As soon as the Gentile felt that he was competent to do the

* See III. iii. 99-100. * See II. ii. 241.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 285
Jew’s work, he coveted the Jew’s place for himself in addition to his
own; and the Jew, on his side, was resentful at the prospect of being
frozen out of his original niche in an expanding Western economic
edifice. At a stage at which agriculture had been the staple industry of an
infant Western Society, the Western Gentiles had taken advantage of a
majority’s brute power of numbers to monopolize the ownership and
occupation of the land and had profited doubly by that economic in¬
justice to the Jews when this penalized minority—duly responding to the
challenge of penalization 1 —had made good the Western Society's most
serious economic deficiency by making something of such modest
opportunities for commerce as were to be found in a backward agrarian
economy. And now' the Western Gentiles were bent on driving out of the
commercial as well as the agricultural field a Jewish diaspork which had
done the Western World the twofold service of building the West’s
once exiguous commerce up into a lucrative business and thereby teach¬
ing their Gentile neighbours the tricks of a valuable trade.

The Plot of the Jezoish Tragedy in a Western Christendom

This economic quarrel between Jews and Western Gentiles ran
through three acts. In the first act—classically performed in seventh-
century Visigothia—the Jews were as unpopular as they were indispens¬
able, but the ill-treatment which they incurred through their unpopularity
was usually kept within bounds by the incapacity of their Gentile
persecutors to fill their places. At this stage the worst that happened to
the Jews as a rule was to be compelled to hand over to the Gentiles—by
way of bribes, surtaxes, fines, and qther euphemisms for robbery—a
substantial portion of the wealth that was perpetually accumulating in
the Jews’ hands owing to the pre-eminence of their ability in the pursuits
of trade and finance on which a Gentile majority had constrained them
to concentrate their energies. The second act opened, in one Western
country after another, as soon as a nascent Gentile bourgeoisie had
acquired sufficient experience, skill, and capital of its own to feel itself
capable of usurping the local Jews’ place; for at that stage—as was
demonstrated not only in thirteenth-century England and in fifteenth-
century Spain but in twentieth-century Poland and Hungary—the
Gentile bourgeois might be tempted to use the pow'er conferred by
numbers in order to rid themselves by force of long-established Jewish
predecessors whom they might not have found it so easy to defeat in
peaceful and honest economic competition. This second act—which
was as discreditable to the Gentiles as it was tragic for the Jews—was
followed by a third act in Western countries where the local representa¬
tives of a now w’ell-establishcd Gentile bourgeoisie had become such
past masters in Jewish economic arts that their traditional fear of suc¬
cumbing to Jewish competition no longer constrained them to forgo
the economic advantage of re-enlisting Jewish ability in the service of
their national economy.

Modern Western countries in which the Gentile bourgeoisie had
arrived at this degree of professional self-confidence found it to their

1 See II. ii. 309.

286 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES •
interest to give political asylum and economic opportunity to Jewish
outcasts from economically more backward Western countries that were
still in the violently anti-Jcwish second stage of Western relations with
Jewry. In this spirit the Tuscan Government allowed crypto-Jcwish
refugees from Spain and Portugal to settle at Leghorn in and after a.d.
1593 j 1 Holland had already opened her doors to Portuguese crypto-
Jewish refugees since a.d. 1579;* and England, which in the seven¬
teenth century was following hard on Holland’s heels in a race for
primacy in the West’s now world-wide trade, ventured from a . d . 1655
onwards to readmit a Jewish diaspora which she had expelled in a.d.
1290 when a nascent Gentile English bourgeoisie had been ruthlessly
elbowing its way into Jewry’s ancient preserves.

A Mirage of Enfranchisement

The economic enfranchisement of the Jews which followed the
Modern Western Gentile bourgeoisie’s attainment of its own economic
maturity was accompanied by a social and political enfranchisement
which was a consequence of the contemporary religious and ideological
revolutions in Western Christendom. The outbreak of the Protestant
Reformation early in the sixteenth century broke the united Christian
front with which the Jewish diaspora in the West had been faced since
the conversion to Catholicism of the last surviving local Arian ‘ascen¬
dancy’ towards the end of the seventh century; 1 and, though the modern
fracture in the Western body ecclesiastic conformed to the peculiar
structure of the Western Society in breaking on vertical and not on
horizontal lines, it nevertheless bought the Jewish diaspori substantial
relief. In seventeenth-century Holland and England, for example, the
Jews were given a welcome not only because they had become useful
partners instead of formidable competitors in a competent local Gentile
bourgeoisie’s eyes but also because they were the victims of these
Protestant Christians’ Catholic Christian enemies. And, when, towards
the close of the seventeenth century, the Catholic and Protestant peoples
of a Gentile Western World tacitly agreed to drop the religious bone of
contention which had been at least the ostensible object of their Wars of
Religion, the re-establishment of peace between previously contending
Christian sects this time brought the Jew's a further measure of relief
from Christian pressure instead of the turn of the screw which the Jews
had experienced in Visigothia after the ending of the feud there between
Arian and Catholic Christians in a.d. 587.

' See II. ii. 244. In planting Peninsular Jewish refugees in Leghorn the Florentines
were moved by the same combination of economic with political considerations that had
already led the 'Osmanlis to plant them in Constantinople and Salonica. The 'Osmanlis
wanted these Jewish immigrants to take the bread out of the mouths of their Greek
ra'iyih; the Florentines wanted the Jewish settlers at Leghorn to take it out of the
mouths of the Pisans, whom the Florentines had finally conquered and crushed in a.d.
1509. The Florentine conquerors of Pisa, like the Ottoman conquerors of Rumelia,
were concerned not merely to promote the economic welfare of their recently acquired
empire but to find some way of doing this without thereby creating an opportunity for
their conquered rivals to recapture a commercial prosperity which had been the source
of their former political and military power. * Sec ibid.

3 The Lombards were not converted to a fully orthodox form of Catholicism till a.d.
698 (see Lot, F: Lei Invasions Germaniques (Paris 1935, Payot), p. 283).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 287
The reason for this difference in the consequences for the Jews lay, of
course, in the difference in the spirit in which the Christians patched up
their quarrels on these two historic occasions. In sixth-century Visi-
gothia the peace of the Church had been restored through a conversion
of the Arians to Catholicism which had left the Jews in the invidious
position of being the only surviving dissenters; in a seventeenth-century’
Western World ecclesiastical peace was restored by a tacit agreement to
continue to differ without continuing to take this religious difference to
heart; and a growing indifference to religious issues, which was both
the cause and the consequence of the damping of a Judaic flame of
religious fanaticism in the relations between Christian and Christian,
inevitably had its effect on the traditional attitude of the Christian
towards the Jew. The diversion of Gentile hearts and minds from applied
theology to applied science towards the close of the seventeenth century
was duly followed at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
by the official emancipation of the Jews on the social and the political as
well as the economic plane. On the European Continent this beneficent
practical application of the Ideas of 1775 and 1789 was propagated from
Revolutionary France into Germany and Italy by the Napoleonic
Empire; in the New World it was propagated by the revolutions in
which the American colonies of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal
successively achieved their independence. By a.d. 1914 the official
emancipation of the Jews on all planes of human activity was a long
since accomplished fact in all provinces of the Modern Western World
outside the former territories of the extinct United Kingdom of Poland-
Lithuania—which, except for Poznan, West Prussia, and Galicia, had
been included since a.d. 1815 in ‘the Jewish Pale’ of the Russian

E Thus, on the eve of the First World War, ‘the Jewish problem’ in the
Western World might have been thought to have found a solution in
a fusion of the Jewish and Christian communities with one another
through a union that had been a voluntary- act on both sides instead of
having been imposed forcibly on the weaker by the stronger party. In a
bourgeois and secular Modern Western Society in which the now all-
important field of business activity had been reopened to the Jews on
equal terms with the Gentiles, while Religion had sunk into being a
matter of secondary importance or no importance at all, why should not
the individual Jew become socially uniform with the individual Gentile
by evolving into a Western bourgeois of the Jewish religious denomina¬
tion or of no religious belief or allegiance of any kind ? In the Western
World in the course of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era the
process of assimilation on this basis did in fact go very far, and it was
conceivable that it might have ended in a complete obliteration of the
historic communal distinction between Jews and Western Christians if
the process had not been cut short through the sudden and unexpected
seizure of the Western World by a fresh paroxysm of trouble as severe
as the previous bout from which it had emerged towards the close of the
seventeenth century. 1 Nineteenth-century Western hopes of solving

1 Sec V. vi. 315-16.

288 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the Jewish problem, like nineteenth-century Western hopes of abolish¬
ing the institution of War, proved in retrospect 1 to have been a delusion;
and a tragedy which had momentarily looked as if it were a play in three
acts then entered on a fourth act which was more horrifying than any of
its three predecessors and which afforded no glimpse of any prospect of
finality.

The Fate of the European Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, a . d . 1933-48

The peculiar horror of this fourth act lay in the unprecedented wicked¬
ness of the malefactors and unprecedented sufferings of both innocent
Jewish victims and an innocent Arab third party.

On the Gentile actors’ side the German persecution of the Jews in
Continental Europe in the years a.d. 1933-45 was far more shocking
than the Spanish and Portuguese persecution of the Jews in the Iberian
Peninsula in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While both persecu¬
tions had been prompted by economic motives that had been given a less
disreputable and less self-interested appearance by being cloaked under
a show of idealism, the medieval Peninsular Christians’ profession of
zeal for their religion was not so insincere as the modern German Neo-
Pagans’ profession of zeal for the idolatrous worship of their tribe—as
was shown by the fact that the Spaniards and Portuguese did genuinely
enfranchise any Jews who conformed to the practice of Western
Christianity, whereas the German National Socialists’ racial tribalism
left a Jew no avenue of escape from being the ‘non-Aryan’ that Nature
was alleged to have made him. The medieval Iberian Christians, again,
were naively practising their traditional religion according to their be¬
nighted understanding of its precepts, whereas the modern German
Nazis had deliberately repudiated the humanitarianism that had been
the cardinal virtue in the moral code of a post-Christian Modern
Western Enlightenment.

The full measure of the Nazis’ depravity is not given in the bare
statistical statement—appalling though these figures are—that, within
a period of no more than twelve years, they reduced the Jewish popula¬
tion of Continental Europe, west of the Soviet Union, from about 6£
million to about ij million 1 by a process of mass-extermination which

* Sec IV. iv. 141-55.

1 In A.D. 1952 it was not possible to give exact figures based on accurate statistics, and
it seemed improbable that the necessary information would ever be obtainable. Accord¬
ing to The Jewish Year Book, 1947 (London 1948, Jewish Chronicle), pp. 298-9, the
Jewish population of Germany and the Continental European countries occupied by
Germany in the Second World War—not including the occupied parts of the Soviet
Union—was 1,181,600 in April 1946. The American Jetcith Year Book, 1945-6 (Phila¬
delphia 1945, Jewish Publication Society of America) docs not attempt to estimate the

E st-war figures; but vol. xli of the same series, covering the year 1939-40 and pub-
ned in 1939. Rives, on p. 585, figures amounting to a total of 6,484,499 for the Jewish
population of the same area. On this showing, the Jews in the area appear to have been
5,302,899 fewer in 1946 than they had been in 1939; and this figure comes close to the
estimate of a drop from 6J millions to ij millions in the same area between the same
dates, which is given by the Board of Deputies of British Jews in The Jeui in Europe,
their Martyrdom and their Future (London 1945, Woburn House), p. 38.

. In these calculations there were several possible sources of error. The areas in ques¬
tion for a.d. ; 939-40 *nd for A.D. 1946 might not be exactly conterminous; and, in order

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 289
was so unprecedentedly systematic and cold-blooded that the new word
‘genocide’ had to be coined to describe what was in effect a new crime.
In the operation of the dcstructor-plants in which the Nazis’ victims
were asphyxiated, the maniacal sadism of the men and women in com¬
mand was less appalling than the criminal docility of the hundreds and
thousands of subordinates who duly carried out their monstrous instruc¬
tions, and the moral cowardice of the German public, who took good
care to avoid acquainting themselves with the atrocities that their hus¬
bands, sons, and brothers, and even their sisters, wives, and daughters, were
committing in their name. The moral nadir to which German souls sank
under the Nazi dispensation is revealed, not only in these murders and
physical tortures that were perpetrated by German hands, but also in
the odious precept and example through which pastors and masters
who were shamefully betraying their trust taught Gentile German
school-children to make life unbearable for their Jewish schoolfellows
by the industrious infliction of studied unkindness.

This moral downfall of one of the leading nations of a Modern Western
World in the second quarter of the twentieth century of the Christian
Era shook the foundations of the regime of secular enlightenment on
which the West had been subsisting for a quarter of a millennium. It
showed that the gain won by discarding a Judaic Christian fanaticism in
the reaction against the savagery of the Early Modem Western Wars of
Religion had been outweighed by the loss suffered through the simultan¬
eous smothering of a likewise Judaic Christian love. After this modern
German exhibition of the volcanic potentialities of an undomesticated
Original Sin, it was impossible to retain Modern Western Man’s latter-
day dogmatic belief in the inevitable progress of a secularized Western
Civilization and in the self-perfectibility of a graceless Human Nature.
But the Nazi Gentiles’ fall was less tragic than the Zionist Jews’. On the
morrow of a persecution in Europe in which they had been the victims
of the worst atrocities ever known to have been suffered by Jews or
indeed by any other human beings, the Jews’ immediate reaction to their
own experience was to become persecutors in their turn for the first
time since a.d. 135—and this at the first opportunity that had since arisen
for them to inflict on other human beings who had done the Jews no
injury, but who happened to be weaker than they were, some of the
wrongs and sufferings that had been inflicted on the Jews by their
many successive Western Gentile persecutors during the intervening
seventeen centuries. In a.d. 1948 some 684,000 out of some 859,000
Arab inhabitants of the territory in Palestine which the Zionist Jews

to estimate from the figure for the drop in the Jewish population the figure for the num¬
ber of Jews who had been done to death, a statistician would have on the one hand to
add an unknown number for the losses of the Jewish population in the German-occupied
territories of the Soviet Union, and on the other hand to allow for a number of survivors
who, by April 1946, had already migrated from Germany and the ex-German-occupied
countries since VE-Day. Allowing for these unknown quantities, it might be estimated
that at least five million Continental European Jews had been done to death by the Nazis
from first to last. In Dr. James Parkes’ opinion—communicated to the writer on the
28th February, 1951, in a comment on this footnote—an estimate of six million, in round
numbers, would be nearer the mark for the figure by which the Jewish population of
Continental Europe, including the Soviet Union, had been reduced since the outbreak
of the War of A.D. I 939 ~ 45 *

B 2399 . vm

290 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
conquered by force of arms in that year lost their homes and property 1
and became destitute ‘displaced persons’. 2

If the heinousness of sin is to be measured by the degree to which the
sinner is sinning against the light that God has vouchsafed to him, the
Jews had even less excuse in a.d. 1948 for evicting Palestinian Arabs from
their homes than Nebuchadnezzar and Titus and Hadrian and the
Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition had had for uprooting, persecuting,
and exterminating Jews in Palestine and elsewhere at divers times in the
past. In a.d. 1948 the Jews knew, from personal experience, what they
were doing; and it was their supreme tragedy that the lesson learnt by
them from their encounter with the Nazi German Gentiles should have
been not to eschew but to imitate some of the evil deeds that the Nazis
had committed againt the Jews. 1 On the Day of Judgement the gravest

1 The figure 859,000 is the estimate of the total non-Jewiah population, on the 31st
December, 1946, of the territory subsequently occupied by Israel within the boundaries
of the i*t May, 1949, which is given in the Final Report of the United Nations Economic
Survey Mission for the Middle East, Part I, The Final Report and Appendices (Lake
Success, N.Y. 1949, United Nations), p. 22, col. a. In the same place the total number of
refugees from Israeli-held territory at the date of the Report is estimated at 726,000,
on the reckoning that the non-Jcwish population then still in Israel amounted to 133,000.
The figure of 604,000 refugees, given on page 289, above, is based on a reckoning by
Dr. James Parkcs that, by January 1951, the number of the non-Jcwish population
in Israel had risen to about 175,000—presumably in consequence of a repatriation of
some 42,000 of the Palestinian Arab 'displaced persons’.

2 While the direct responsibility for this calamity that overtook the Palestinian Arabs
in a.d. 1948 was on the heads of the Zionist Jews who seized a Lebensraum for themselves
in Palestine by force of arms in that year, a heavy load of indirect, yet irrepudiable,
responsibility was on the heads of the people of the United Kingdom; for the Jews would
not have had in a.d. >948 the opportunity to conquer an Arab country in which they had
amounted to no more than an inconsiderable minority in a.d. 1918 if, during the inter¬
vening thirty years, the power of the United Kingdom had not been exerted continuously
to make possible the entry of Jewish immigrants into Palestine contrary to the will,
in despite of the protests, and without regard to the forebodings of Arab inhabitants of
the country w’ho in a.d. 1948 were duly to become the victims of this long pursued
British policy. See further pp. 303-6, below.

* The cold-blooded systematic ‘genocide’ of several millions of human beings in ex¬
termination camps, which had been the worst of the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews, had
no parallel at all in the Jews’ ill-treatment of the Palestinian Arabs. The evil deeds
committed by the Zionist Jews against the Palestinian Arabs that were comparable to
crimes committed against the Jews by the Nazis were the massacre of men, women, and
children at Dayr Yasin on the oth April, 1948, which precipitated a flight of the Arab
population, in large numbers, from districts within range of the Jewish armed forces,
and the subsequent deliberate expulsion of the Arab population from districts conquered
by the Jewish armed forces between the 15th May, 1948, and the end of that year—
e.g. from ‘Akki in May, from Lydda and Ramlah in July, and from Bccrsheba and West¬
ern Galilee in October. When Nazareth was captured in July, most of the population
seems to have been allowed to stay. On the other hand, the Arabs who were expelled
from ‘Akki in May included refugees from Haifa, and those who were expelled from
Lydda and Ramlah in July included refugees from Jaffa, in addition to the local Arab
population. The massacre and the expulsions, between them, were responsible for the
exile of all those Palestinian Arab 'displaced persons’ (to use the current euphemism),
from the territory conquered by the Israelis, who fled from or were driven from this
territory after the 9th April, 1948. The expulsions seem to have accounted for about
284,000 out of the total of about 684,000 Palestinian Arabs who became 'displaced
persons' from first to last, including those who had already been evacuated by the
British mandatory authorities or had already fled on their own initiative or had already
lost their homes as a result of military operations between the outbreak of hostilities
in Palestine in December 1947 and the massacre of the 9th April, 1948.

The Arab blood shed on the 9th April. 1948, at Dayr Yasin was on the heads of Irgun;
the expulsions after the x$th May, 194S, were on the heads of all Israel.

If, on behalf of Israel, it were to be pleaded that these Jewish outrages in a.d. 1948,
even reckoned pro rata, were dwarfed in quantity, as well as in heinousness, by the Nazi
atrocities in a.d. 1933*45. would have to be taken into account, on the other side,

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 291
crime standing to the German National Socialists’ account might be, not
that they had exterminated a majority of the Western Jews, but that
they had caused the surviving remnant of Jewry to stumble. The Jews
in Europe in a.d. 1933-45 had been the vicarious victims of the Germans’
resentment over their military defeat at the hands of their Western
fellow Gentiles in the war of a.d. 1914-18; the Arabs in Palestine in a.d.
1948 became in their turn the vicarious victims of the European Jews’
indignation over the ‘genocide’ committed upon them by their Gentile
fellow Westerners in a.d. 1933-45. This impulse to become a party to
the guilt of a stronger neighbour by inflicting on an innocent weaker
neighbour the very sufferings that the original victim had experienced
at his stronger neighbour’s hands was perhaps the most perverse of all

I the base propensities of Human Nature; 1 for it was a wanton endeavour

to keep in perpetual motion the sorrowful wheel of Karma z to which
Adam-Ixion was bound and from which only Love and Mercy could
ever release him.

The tidal wave that overwhelmed the Palestinian Arabs in a.d. 1948
was a backwash from an upheaval in the relations between Gentiles and
Jews in Western longitudes beyond the Palestinian Arabs’ horizon; 3 and
its catastrophic effect on these innocent strangers’ fortunes was a conse¬
quence of the third of the three peculiarities that have been attributed
i in an earlier passage of this chapter to the Modern Western Civilization. 4

In a Modern Western Society that had come to overshadow all the rest of
Mankind, even an imperfectly and precariously emancipated Jewish
diaspora in the West had become a power in the World through becom¬
ing an effective force in the political life of potent Western countries;
and, in consequence, the West’s unsolved domestic Jewish problem had
become fraught with perils for non-Western and non-Jewish peoples
who had nothing to do with this Western problem except for being in
1 the Westerners’ power. The contemporary unsolved domestic Jewish

problem of the Islamic World in the Yaman and the Maghrib was
without effect on the fortunes of any third party because in the twentieth
century the Islamic Society was impotent to discharge its own debts at
any third party’s expense; but in that age there was no power on Earth
strong enough to say nay to the Western Society when the Western

that the Jews had had much more experience than the Germans had had of the sufferings
that they were inflicting. If the Nazis were debarred from filing the plea that they knew
not what they did, the Israelis were debarred a fortiori.

* This was, of course, a propensity of Human Nature under all veneers, and not just
of Human Nature under the veneer of Judaism or Germanism. Historic examples of it
in which the perpetrators had been non-German Gentiles were the French acts of
aggression against the Italians in a . d . 1494 and against the Syrians in a . d . >920. In
inflicting a sixty-five years' war (eertbatur a . d . 1494-1559) on Italy the French were
taking their revenge for a hundred years’ war (gerebatur a.d. 1337-1451) that had pre¬
viously been inflicted on France not by the Italians but by the English. In invading and
occupying Syria in a.d. 1920 the French were taking their revenge for an occupat ion of
French soil in a . d . 19:4 in which the invaders had been not the Syrians but the Germans.

2 Sec V. v. 427-9 and 432-3.

3 In a.d. 1948 the Palestinian Arabs might aptly have applied to the calamity that over¬
took them in that year the words that had fallen so quaintly from Neville Chamberlain's
lips on the 27th September, 1938. 'How horrible, fantastic, incredible’ it must have
seemed to them that they should have lost their homes 'because of a quarrel in a far¬
away country between people of whom’ they knew 'nothing'.

* Sec p. 277, above.

2 9 z ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
victors in the War of a.d. 1939-45 chose to compensate the Western
Jews for the crimes committed against them by a defeated Western
belligerent at the expense, not of the guilty West, but of an innocent
non-Wcstern people. In its impotence to resist this injustice the rest of
Mankind could only marvel at Western Man’s attempt to obtain absolu¬
tion for a Western sin by imposing a proportionate penance on strangers
who were not implicated in the guilt.

Causes of the Failure of Enfranchisement

This fourth act of the drama in which the Modern West and Jewry
were the dramatis personae was indeed in all respects so disconcertingly
tragic that the historian cannot refrain from seeking to discover the
points at which an apparently promising third act had gone wrong.

One vulnerable point was, of course, the survival of a psychological
barrier between Western Gentiles and Jews after the juridical barrier
between them had been officially removed. In a nineteenth-century
soi-disant Liberal Western World there was still an invisible ghetto with¬
in which the Western Gentile continued to confine the Jew, and the
Jew, on his side, continued to segregate himself from the Western
Gentile. The nominally emancipated Jew found himself still being
excluded—unavowedly yet effectually—from social opportunities and
amenities by his Gentile professed fellow members in an officially
united society, while the Gentile found himself still faced by a free¬
masonry—likewise as effectual as it was unavowed—among Jews who
were eager to claim, without being willing to accord, the benefits that
ought to have accrued equally to all members of both these two ci-devant
millets as a result of their official Gleichschaltung. In fact, either party
continued to observe a double standard of behaviour—a higher standard
for dealing with members of its own crypto-community and a lower
standard for dealing with nominal fellow citizens on the other side of a
supposedly no longer existent social pale—and this new coat of hypo¬
crisy embalming the old vice of inequity made cither party more con¬
temptible, as well as less formidable, in the other’s eyes and thereby
made the situation more exasperating, as well as less onerous, for both
parties.

This immediate aftermath of Jewish emancipation in the West was
ironically disappointing; and, though a substantial improvement in
relations had in fact nevertheless been secured, the precariousness of
this was revealed by the recrudescence of Antisemitism in a nineteenth-
century and a twentieth-century Western World wherever there was any
appreciably rapid increase in the numerical ratio of the Jewish to the
Gentile ingredient in the local population. This tendency was discernible
by the year a.d. 1914 in London and in New York as a result of Jewish
immigration since a.d. 1881 from the former dominions of the extinct
United Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania under pressure of Russian-
instigated persecution; 1 and after a.d. 1918 it became virulent in

* 'In a couple of decades the Jewish population of the United States rose from less
than a quarter of a million to more than a million; that of England from less than a
hundred thousand to nearly a quarter of a million; while France, Holland, and Germany
each received between twenty and twenty-five thousand of these refugees. The new-

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 293
German Austria and the German Reich as a result of further Jewish
immigration from Galicia, ‘Congress Poland’, and the more easterly
provinces of ‘the Pale’ during the First World War . 1

These symptoms revealed a state of affairs that was not only dis¬
appointing but dangerous, yet a warrantable disappointment and
apprehension gave no reasonable grounds for despondency; for it was
one of the well-recognized limitations of Human Nature that human
souls should take time in adjusting themselves emotionally to innova¬
tions which the Reason had endorsed by a stroke of the legislator’s pen;
and, if the Jewish problem in the Western World could have been in¬
sulated from its contemporary Western ideological setting, Time would
have been on the side of an eventual solution of the problem de facto
when once it had been solved de jure —as was shown by the progressive
increase in the frequency of intermarriage between Western Gentiles and
Jews, which was an approximate current index of the progress towards
a de facto solution that was being achieved. Unhappily this beneficent
process of assimilation between individual Western Gentiles and Jews,
which offered the best hope of a solution of the Jewish problem in the
peculiar ideological environment of the Western social tradition, was
overtaken and upset by the eruption of a Modern Western Nationalism
and by the social devastation which this ideological catastrophe brought
in its train.

Modern Western Nationalism attacked the Jewish diaspork in the
Western World on two flanks simultaneously. It led the Western Jews
by its attractiveness and at the same time drove them by its pressure to
invent a Jewish nationalism alia Franca . 1 which might be described as a
collective form of Westernization in contrast to the individual form
associated with a pre-nationalistic Liberal Western dispensation . 5 Like
the Westernizing ideal of turning the individual Jew into a Western
bourgeois of Jewish religion, the alternative Westernizing ideal of turn-

comers were unlike any Jews whom the West had seen for centuries .. . and their great
numbers, coupled with the suspicion of their neighbours, intensified their clannishness
and the difficulty of the simplest political, social, and economic assimilation’ (Parkes, J.:
The Jeuish Problem in the Modern World, ist American cd. (New York 1946, Oxford
University Press), pp. 67-68).

1 The Antisemitism displayed by Gentiles in Poland, Hungary, and Rumania after
a.d. 1918 was not, of course, due to a change in numerical ratios, for in these countries
migration had relieved the pressure of Jewish numbers on Gentile susceptibilities in
proportion to the increase of the same pressure in Austria, Germany, Great Britain, and
the United States. The explanation of the inter-war phenomena in Eastern Europe was
not statistical but historical. In a.d. 1918 the Western countries west of 'the Pale' were
all in Stage Three, at which a now well-established Western Gentile bourgeoisie had
felt themselves able to grant the Jews a dejure (albeit precarious) emancipation. By con¬
trast, the Western Gentile bourgeoisie in Poland and Hungary’ at that date were still in
the militant Stage Two, in which they were aspiring to become their own Jews and were
seeking to clear an economic Lebensraunt for themselves by elbowing the Jews out of
their way, while the Westernizing Gentile population of Rumania (at least in the Rcgat,
as distinct from Transylvania) was still in Stage One, at which the Jewish practitioners
of the higher arts of economic life were as obnoxious to the Gentiles as they were in¬
dispensable to them. In German Austria and Germany a fear of falling back out of
Stage Three into Stage One, as a result of the economic catastrophe precipitated there
by the First World War, no doubt partly accounted for the virulence of the recrudescence
of Antisemitism in those two economically advanced Western countries by comparison
with the relative mildness of the contemporary symptoms in the United Kingdom and
the United States.

* This convenient Italian phrase signified 'in the Western style’ in Ottoman parlance.

1 See II. ii. 2:2-14,

294 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
ing the oecumenical Jewish millet into a parochial nation (concentrated,
Western-fashion, within the frontiers of a national territory with an
exclusively and homogeneously Jewish population) was evidence that
the emancipation of a Western Jewry in the nineteenth century of the
Christian Era had been genuine enough to expose the Western Jews, for
the first time in the history of their relations with their Gentile neigh¬
bours, to the influence of current Western ideas and ideals. At the same
time, Zionism, on the testimony of Theodor Herzl himself, was also
evidence of an anxiety, in nineteenth-century Western Jewish souls,
lest the avenue of individual assimilation, which had previously been
opened up to Western Jews by the advent of a Modern Western Gentile
Liberalism, might be closed to them again by the onset of a Modern
Gentile Nationalism that was treading hard on Liberalism’s heels . 1

The last quarter of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era wit¬
nessed a recrudescence of Antisemitism in the Western World that was
as ominous as it was unexpected. In point of numbers the greatest blow
dealt to a Western Jewry in this generation was the instigation of
pogroms in ‘the Pale’ by a Russian Tsardom in extremis which resorted
to this base exped ient in and after a .d. 1881 2 in the futile hope of diverting
the hostility of its Gentile subjects from its own head on to the heads of
their Jewish neighbours. 3 Yet this fresh outbreak of persecution in the
backward eastern fringes of the Western World on the initiative of a
non-Western regime was not so alarming a portent as the contemporary
symptoms in Germany and France. The first explosion of Antisemitism
in a latter-day Germany (saeviebat aj>. 1873-96) was a flash in the pan. 4
The Dreyfus Affair (saeviebat a.d. 1894-1906), to which a Liberal France
succumbed in the hour of her demoralization after her defeat by Germany
in a.d. 1870-r, was more deeply disturbing. 5 The spectacle of anti-
Jewish demonstrations in Paris at the time when the battle over the
Dreyfus case was being fought out in France was the experience that
converted the Austrian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl from being an
ardent assimilationist into becoming the Apostle of Zionism. 6

It is perhaps no accident that a nineteenth-century Jewish Zionism and
a twentieth-century German Neo-Antisemitism should have arisen
successively in the same geographical zone of the Western World, and
that this locus should have been the German-speaking territories of the
Austrian Empire just west of the domains of the Hungarian Crown of
St. Stephen and the former United Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania.
This Austrian zone lay sufficiently far to the west for its Jewish inhabi¬
tants to be subject to infection by current Western ideologies—including
Nationalism as well as Liberalism—in a Modern Western Liberal Age, and
sufficiently far to the east for its Gentile inhabitants to be no less subject

1 See IV. iv. 163. 2 See p. 292, above.

* See Parkcs, op. cit., chap. 4, especially pp. 62-66.

* See Parkcs, op. cit., pp. 42-44. * See Parke*, op. cit., pp. 35-39.

6 See Parkes, op. cit., p. 89. In a comment on the first draft of the present chapter of
this Study, the same Western Christian Gentile student of Jewish history put in the
following words the dilemma with which the Jewish diaspori in the West found itself
confronted in Herd's generation: ‘Western nationalism fundamentally made Jewish
assimilation impossible. The tragedy was implicit in the Jews’ position, not in the Jews'
choice of Nationalism. Whichever line they adopted offered them a tragic solution.’

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 295
to infection by pre-Liberal Western ideologies still persisting among the
backward Gentile populations of the adjoining ‘Pale’ after the dawn of
Liberalism farther west; and the notion that the Western Jews might
win for themselves, by adopting Western Nationalism, an asylum which
they might prove not to have secured through a conversion to Western
Liberalism would naturally present itself to the minds of Austrian
Jews whose nineteenth-century status of individual emancipation was
threatened by the simultaneous onsets of a Modern Gentile Nationalism
from Western Europe and a Medieval Gentile Antisemitism from ‘the
Pale ’. 1

Inherent Consequences of the Captivation of the Jews by a Modem Western
Gentile Nationalism

A Modern Western Gentile Nationalism, with its medieval objective
of self-imposed ghettos for all peoples, was an exaggeration, amounting
to a caricature, of the traditional Western ideal of the homogeneous
single-community parochial state; but, in this archaistic Modern
Western ideology’s North American and West European birthplaces,
its devastating effects were mitigated by the circumstance that in these
countries Nationalism was virtually a consecration of the existing state of
the map. In France and other Western countries on both shores of the
Atlantic towards the close of the eighteenth century, the populations
actually were distributed in locally homogeneous blocks approximately
corresponding to the territories of existing sovereign states; and, though,
as the mania of Nationalism progressively travelled eastwards—infecting
first the eastern parts of the Western World and thereafter the domains

of divers living non-Western societies—it was successively attacking
countries where the contemporary cartographical facts were more and
more sharply at variance with the nationalistic ideal, it was not till it
attacked the Western Jewish diaspora that it came to affect a community
whose contemporary geographical distribution and political allegiance
afforded Nationalism no vestige whatsoever of a basis in the realm of
existing facts.

The alien converts to this Modern Western Nationalism whose pre¬
dicament came nearest to being like that of the Jews were the Armenians;
yet even the Armenians differed from the Jews in having continuously
preserved, into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a remnant of an
ancestral territory in which they were still the local cultivators of the
soil. While the latter-day Jewish and Armenian diasporas were remark¬
ably similar to one another in geographical distribution, economic
occupation, communal organization, and psychological attitude, there
was no element in a latter-day Jewry corresponding to the autochthon¬
ous Armenian peasantry of Van, Erivan, and the Qarabagh; and, in the
light of the consequences of the impact of Nationalism on the Armenians,
this difference in the situation of the Armenian and the Jewish people in
the twentieth century had a bearing on Jewry’s prospects. In the fortunes

1 The Antisemitic Chrislian-Social leader Karl Lueger was elected Burgomaster of
Vienna in October >895, and was allowed by the Emperor Francis Joseph to assume
office in March 1897 after he hid been re-elected no less than four times against the
Emperor’s veto.—Parkes, op. tit., p. 49.

296 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
of the Armenian diaspora the impact of Nationalism had spelled tragedy;
for the adoption of the Western ideal of Nationalism by an Armenian
diaspora that was everywhere in a minority had threatened the non-
Armenian majority among whom they were dispersed with the alter¬
native calamities of subjugation or eviction, and this menaced majority
had safeguarded its own future by the barbarous method of wiping the
Armenian diaspora off the map in the successive massacres and deporta¬
tions of which the Armenians were the victims in the Ottoman Empire
between a.d. 1896 and a.d. 1922. In this catastrophe which their conver¬
sion to Nationalism had brought upon them, the Armenian people were
saved from complete extinction thanks to their having preserved a parcel
of territory in which they had never ceased to constitute a majority of the
local population; and the generation that saw the destruction of the
Armenian diaspora in Turkey also saw the establishment of a miniature
Armenian national state in the shape of the Republic of Erivan within
the framework of the Soviet Union.

This Armenian experience illustrated a simple law of Nationalism
which was manifest to historians though it had been ignored by national¬
ists. The destructiveness of Nationalism was proportionate to the degree
of the discrepancy between the ideal of Nationalism and the local state
of existing geographical and political facts. Even in the ci-devant British
colonies in North America, where the discrepancy was at a minimum
at the date of the Revolutionary War, it was nevertheless sufficiently
serious to make itself grievously felt in the expulsion of the United
Empire Loyalists. 1 The enormously greater devastation caused by the
impact of Nationalism on the Armenians was proportionate to the
enormously greater degree of the discrepancy in that case. What was to
be the outcome of the impact of Nationalism on the Jews, in whose case
the discrepancy was at its maximum? By the time when Zionism was
inaugurated in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, more than
seventeen hundred years had passed since the last date at which there
had been any territory continuously inhabited by a compact Jewish
agricultural population corresponding to the Armenian peasantry in
the neighbourhood of Erivan. The Jews had had no living homeland
of the kind since a.d. 135, when the last roots of Jewry in Judaea had
been pulled out of the soil by the Romans. 2 What practical applications
of the Modern Western ideal of Nationalism were open to a people in
this historical plight?

In theory, Jewish nationalists alia Franca had a choice between two
alternatives. Their objective of providing Jewry w’ith a country which
would be ‘as Jewish as England’ was ‘English’ 1 could be attained either
by colonizing some no-man’s-land in ‘the great open spaces’, which had

1 See IV. iv. 165-7.

* Dr. James Parkes comments:

‘When the last roots of Jewry were pulled up in the hills of Judaea, substantial
communities remained across the Jordan, around the fringes and in the plains, and a
relatively compact and by that time more numerous Jewish community in Galilee was
almost untouched. The Galilean patriarchate exercised certain political and religious
powers over Jews elsewhere right up to A.D. 435. This is the date of the disappearance
of anything which could be called a Jewish government [in Palestine).’

1 A phrase quoted by Sir W. Churchill in his memorandum of the 3rd June, 1922.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 297
been opened up through Western pioneering enterprise, or alternatively
by supplanting the Gentile inhabitants of such parts of Palestine as had
been inhabited by Jews before a.d. 135. The second of these two alterna¬
tive possible programmes was beset with difficulties, moral as well as
material. It required the eviction of an existing population which, by the
year a.d. 1897, when Theodor Her2l inaugurated the Zionist Movement,
must be reckoned to have been at home in Palestine for more than
seventeen and a half centuries, since the most recent drastic change in
the composition of the population of Palestine had taken place as far
back as the morrow of the suppression, in a.d. 135, 1 of the last Jewish
insurrection against the Roman Imperial Government, when there had
been a systematic colonization of the previously Jewish-inhabited dis¬
tricts of Palestine by Gentile settlers from other parts of the Roman
Empire. 2

Even if it were to be assumed—though this assumption would be un¬
warrantable—that the subsequent population included no elements that
had been there before the second century of the Christian Era, this
latter-day population's tenancy of its Palestinian home would still have
been longer, by at least a hundred years, than the previous tenancy of
the same parts of Palestine by the Children of Israel and Judah—on
the assumption that these too had not incorporated any elements from
an earlier population—even at the longest reckoning of the interval
between the entry of the Israelites in the course of a post-Minoan
Volkenvandcrung in the days of the New Empire of Egypt and the evic¬
tion of the Jews by the Romans in a.d. 70 and a.d. 135.* A similar

1 The subsequent change that had followed the Primitive Muslim Arab conquest of
Palestine in a.d. 636-7 had been not only much less abrupt but also probably smaller
even in the aggregate. The Arabs who had seeped into Palestine gradually in the course
of the next i ,260 years had made Palestine a wholly Arabic-speaking country by convert¬
ing much more than by supplanting the pre-existing population.

* See Spruner, K., and Menke, Th.: Atlas Ar.tiquus, 3rd ed. (Gotha 1862, Perthes),
Plate No. xxvi, the central map: 'Syria Phoenicc, Syria Palaestina Provinciac ab Aerac
Christianae Anno 70 usque ad Oiocletiani Tcmpus.’

1 Dr. James Parkes comments:

‘I do not believe that the argument about changes of tenancy is valid. There is no
moment in Palestinian history’ when, over the whole or a large part of the country, there
was a sudden change of population. Many who think of themselves as Arabs to-day had
ancestors who had been at one time heathen or “Canaanites”, and later Jews, and then,
probably, Christians (after Justinian). There is an unchanging core of indefinable size,
and there are accretions of every century. Certainly there were far more Jews in the
country for at least a century after the Arab conquest than there were "Arabs” or “Mus¬
lims”; and, when the majority became Muslim and Arabic-speaking, it is probable that
more were ex-Jews and ex-Christians than newly-arrived “Arabs”, though there must
have been a considerable number of the latter, especially after good government passed
and allowed increasing badawi encroachment.’

This comment, with which the writer of this Study entirely agreed (see p. 207. n. x,
above), moved him to add a comment of his own. In his personal opinion the title of the
population of Palestine or any other country to be left in the undisturbed possession of
their homes rested on the human rights of the living generation, and its validity did not
depend on the production of evidence prosing that the living generation’s ancestors had
been in situ for this or that number of centuries. If, however, the question of the legiti¬
macy of the title of the non-Jewish population inhabiting Palestine during the half
century a.d. 1897-1948 were to be argued on the (in the writer’s opinion) more academic
ground of length of ancestral tenure, then evidently the historical facts cited by Dr.
Parkes in his comment and agreed with him by the present writer would make the pre-
Zionist population’s title overwhelmingly strong ; for, on this showing, the living genera¬
tion of this population were the descendants, heirs, and representatives not merely of
the Arabs who had seeped in since the conquest of Palestine by the Primitive Muslim

L 2

B 2888. VXXI

2 9 S ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
eviction of the population by which Palestine was inhabited at the close
of the nineteenth century, and by which it continued to be inhabited
down to the year a.d. 1948, could be achieved only by an act of military
aggression, at the existing population’s expense, such as had been com¬
mitted by the wild tribesmen of Israel and Judah when they had origin¬
ally broken into Palestine from the Arabian Desert, and by the Minoan
Philistines and Western Christian Crusaders when they had broken in
from the Mediterranean seaboard. Such aggression would be militarily
and politically difficult to commit so long as Palestine remained within
the Ottoman Empire and until Zionism obtained the backing of a pre¬
ponderant group of Western Powers; and, under all military and political
conditions, it would be morally difficult to defend in a world in which the
progress of technology was making the scourge of war so prohibitively
severe that aggression was coming to be recognized for the crime that
it always had been. It would likewise be morally difficult for Zionists
to justify in the eyes, not only of the Gentiles, but also of the traditionally
orthodox Jews of the quietist school known as Agudath Israel . 1

Inherent Consequences of Zionism's Departure from a Traditional Jewish
Practice of Political Quietism

While a confident expectation of the eventual return of a surviving
diaspora of Jewry and a vanished diaspora of Israel to their previous
homes in Palestine was a fundamental tenet of orthodox Judaism which
had inspired the Jewish diaspora to preserve its communal identity over
a period of 1,762 years, reckoning back from the inauguration of the
Zionist Movement in a . d . 1897 to the suppression of Bar Kokaba’s
messianic insurrection in a . d . 135, the sixty generations of Jews in
diaspora that had come and gone in the course of that flow of Time had
persisted in leaving it to Almighty God to carry out on His, and not on
His Chosen’s People’s, initiative a restoration that all schools of orthodox
Judaism alike held to be an act that was God’s prerogative. This per¬
sistent practice of all post-Hadrianic Jews—orthodox, heretical, agnostic,
and anti-religious—had been consecrated by Agudath Israel in their
belief that any fresh recourse to a human initiative for the purpose of
bringing the restoration ter pass would be an impious usurpation of
God’s prerogative by human hands.

In taking this view the Agudath appear to have been a minority
among the orthodox, and the Mizrachi who embraced Zionism without
admitting that this was incompatible with orthodoxy could argue that a
post-Hadrianic practice of refraining from taking political action for
bringing about the return had been merely prompted by manifest ex-

Arabs in a.d. 636-7, and not merely of the Hellenic or Hellenizing Gentile colonists who
had been planted in Palestine in the second century of the Christian Era, but of the Jews
and the Israelites themselves and of the Israelites' incorporated Canaanite predecessors
right back to the Mesolithic Natufian fathers of agriculture and the Middle Palaeolithic
Carmelite cross-breeds between Homo Sapiens and Homo Ntandcrtalensis (see Albright,
W. F.: The Archaeology of Palestine (Lone Ion 1949. Penguin). pp, 59 and 55).

1 The attitude of Agudath Israel and the difference between its negative-minded non¬
violence and the positive-minded non-violence of Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai’s response
to the challenge of the fall of Jerusalem in a.d. 70, have been noticed in V. v. 76, 588-9,
and 617, n. 2, and V. vi. 128.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 299

pediency without being enjoined by any generally accepted article of
Jewish belief. Against the practice of the 1,762 years running back from
a.d. 1897 to a.d. 135 they could adduce the contrary practice of the 674
years running back from a.d. 135 to 539 B.c., during which the Jews,
after having first hailed as their messiah their Gentile liberator Cyrus the
Achacmenid, had risen again and again, at the call of successive native
Thcudases and Judases, on the then forlorn hope of restoring an ex¬
tinguished kingdom of David by force of Jewish arms. The orthodox
Jewish converts to a Herzlian Zionism could also argue that, while a
policy of quietism might, in adverse circumstances, be expedient, a
policy of activism could never be impious, since another fundamental
tenet of Judaism was a belief that God works within History and not
outside it, and gives effect to His will in human affairs by acting through
divinely inspired human agents. Yet, however cogent the Mizrachi 's
reply to the Agudath might be, there were difficulties in their position
likewise.

These difficulties did not arise in regard to those Gentile militarists
and empire-builders who, in Jewish belief, had been historic agents of
the Almighty God of Israel; for, if these Gentiles had indeed played this
role, they had been signally unaware of the mission which they were
carrying out. The Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Seleucid, and Roman war¬
lords, whose crushing military superiority might appear, to an un¬
enlightened eye, to be the natural explanation of Israel’s and Judah’s
calamities, remained naively ignorant of the bizarre fact that, in the sight
of Jewish seers, they had been the unintentional and unconscious agents
of a One True God 1 who had been employing them, without deigning
to make them privy to His counsels, to punish His Chosen People for
their sins with an eye to forgiving and restoring this Chosen People
when a sufficient experience of suffering should have brought forth
fruits meet for repentance 1 in Jewish hearts. There was no moral
ambiguity or ambivalence in the role of an unintentional and unconscious
agent of God’s act of forgiveness and restoration, for which a Gentile
Cyrus had been cast by a Jewish prophet ; 3 but what about the subse¬
quent Jewish soi-disant messiahs who had claimed the allegiance of their
fellow Jews on the pretension that they were the Lord’s Anointed?
How were their fellow Jews to discern whether these professed execu¬
tants of God’s will were truly inspired? And, even if they were not
cynically fraudulent impostors, could they be acquitted of being
presumptuously arrogant visionaries? Could they be held innocent of
having taken the divine law into their own human hands ? And was not
this an act of presumption which was also an act of impiety ? Was not the
Lord’s repudiation of their claim and disapproval of their action patently
signified in the heaviness of the disasters which He had invariably
allowed them to bring upon themselves and upon their deluded
followers ? And, if this had been God’s judgement on the Theudases and
Judases, who had never dreamed of disbelieving in God, and who had
been prompted by a sincere though misguided desire to put God’s will

« See V. vi. 123-6. * Matt. iii. 8; cp. Luke iii. 8.

J Deutero-Isaiah xliv. 28 and xlv. 1-4.

300 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
into effect by hastening the advent of a messianic kingdom which God
had promised to Judah through His prophets, how was a God-fearing
Jewry to reconcile itself with a secular Zionist movement that numbered
agnostics among its leaders, and whose programme had been inspired,
not by the messianic visions of post-Exilic Jewish prophets, but by the
blue-prints of a Western Gentile Nationalism whose prophets had been
a King Louis XI of France, a King Henry VII of England, and the
Florentine publicist Niccolb Machiavclli ? l

These theological and moral difficulties in the ideology of Zionism
were matched by its political awkwardness; for, in deliberately departing
from the political quietism that had been Jewry’s consistent practice for
some sixty generations ending in a.d. 1897, it had abandoned a tradi¬
tional Jewish attitude that had made Jewry’s survival in diaspora possible
by inspiring the Jews with an unquenchable hope without confronting
the Jews’ Gentile successors in Palestine with a standing menace. So
long as the Jewish diaspora was content bona fide to leave the future of
Palestine in the hands of God, the existing Christian and Muslim
inhabitants of the Promised Land could afford to do likewise; and, when
the orthodox Jewish doctrine of an eventual repatriation of Jewry to
Palestine through an act of God was thus accompanied by a traditional
Jewish practice of political quietism, the doctrine—like a derivative
Christian doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ—could be interpreted
in crude Machiavellian or Marxian terms as a psychological device, not
for bringing to pass a ‘far-off divine event to which the whole creation
moves’, 2 but for maintaining, en attendant ad infinitum, the social cohe¬
sion of a mundane community in diaspord. 3 A worldly-minded member
of the relatively prosperous latter-day Jewish diaspora in the Western
World west of ‘the Pale’ might accordingly endorse, on grounds of
present communal self-interest, a traditional belief which an unworldly-
minded member of a still unemancipated Jewry in ‘the Pale’ would
cherish as a corollary of his trust in God and his intuition that the true
end of Man is to glorify and enjoy God for ever.

It will be seen that Agudath Israel’s religious scruples and the
Palestinian Arabs’ political anxieties alike could have been reconciled
with a latter-day Jewish nationalism alia Franca if the Zionists had
decided to seek a site for the Jewish national state of their dreams, not in
Palestine, but in some no-man’s-land. In the first chapter of the history
of Zionism this issue was an open question which was hotly contested.
It was not till an offer of a site in East Africa had been made by the
British Government on the 14th August, 1903, and been declined by the
Seventh Zionist Congress in a . d . 1905 4 that the die was irrevocably cast
in favour of identifying the goal of latter-day Jewish nationalist en-

* See II. ii. 252-4 and V. vi. 216.

1 Tennyson: In Memoriam, Conclusion, Stanza xxxvi.

1 A deeper and more convincing psychological interpretation of the Jewish and the
Christian hope might be that both doctrines were myth9, formulated in collective terms,
of a spiritual pilgrim’s progress through which it was open to the souls of individual
human beings to return, with God’s help, from an exile in the wilderness of Original
Sin to a lost paradise of voluntary concordance with the will of their Creator.

4 Sec Sokolow, N.: History of Zionism, 1600-191S (London 1919, Longmans Green,
2 vols.), vol. i, pp. 296-7; Stein, L.: Zionism (London 1925, Bcnn), pp. 94-95.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 301

deavours with the Palestinian qib/ah of the traditional Jewish religious
hope. This fateful decision was not dictated a priori by the orthodox
Jewish tradition. In the hyper-orthodox eyes of Agudath Israel, a Political
Zionism that had selected the historical Zion as its objective had indeed,
as we have seen, thereby rendered itself guilty of impiety. The preference
for Palestine over East Africa was prompted by the spirit of the exotic
Gentile ideology to which the Zionist Jews had succumbed; for the
ethos of this Modern Western Nationalism was inveterately archaistic, 1
and, in opting for Palestine in a.d. 1903-5, the Zionists were acting
under the inspiration of a Western Gentile Romantic Movement which
had previously captivated the Gentile peoples round about them. 1

Archaism, as we have seen in another context, 3 is always a perilous
pursuit, but it is most perilous of all when it is taken up by members of a
community that is a fossil relic of a dead civilization, since the Past to
which the archaists have it in their power to cast back in such a case may
be more sharply at variance with present realities than even the remotest
past state of a society belonging to the living generation of the species.
A Western-inspired archaism carried the twentieth-century Zionist
faction of a Jewish diaspork back to the aims and ethos of the generation
of Joshua; and the consequent replacement of the traditional Jewish hope
of an eventual restoration of Israel to Palestine on God’s initiative,
through the agency of a divinely inspired Messiah, by a Zionist Move¬
ment, working to establish a Jewish national state in Palestine on Jewry’s
initiative by mundane political and military means, had the same explosive
effect as the contemporary replacement of the traditional Christian hope
of an eventual millennium to be inaugurated at the Second Coming of
Christ by a Communist Movement working to establish a mundane new
dispensation by means of a world revolution.

‘When ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel
the Prophet, standing where it ought not (let him that readeth under¬
stand), then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains. . . . For in
those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the
creation which God created unto this time.’ 4

The Effects of the First World War on the Destiny of Palestine

The calamities which inexorably overtook the Jews in Continental
Europe and the Arabs in Palestine in the twentieth century of the
Christian Era were indeed implicit in the decision taken in the nine¬
teenth century by a section of the Jewish diaspora in the West when
they adopted a programme of collective Westernization on the lines of
the archaistically oriented Modern Western ideal of Nationalism. Yet
the rise of a Zionist Movement whose objective was a Jewish national
state in Palestine would not in itself have been capable of producing

1 The influence of this vein of Archaism in aggravating a Modem Western National¬
ism’s devastating effect on the lives of its Ottoman Orthodox Christian converts has
been noticed on p. 191, n. 2, above.

* ‘Zionism, in defiance of common-sense but in obedience to a deep-seated instinct,

declared itself once and for all a movement concerned wholly and solely with Palestine’
(Stein, op. cit., p. 95). » In V. si. 49-97.

* Mark xiii. 14 and 19; Matt. xxiv. 15 and 21; Dan. xi. 31 and xii. xi.

302 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
these tragic effects if a Gentile Western Society had not fallen into a
succession of world wars, precipitated by the indigenous nationalism of
the Gentile Western peoples, for which neither Arabs nor Jews were
responsible. The outbreak of the First World War struck the fatal spark
that ignited a fortuitously laid train of gunpowder.

The first link in a concatenation of inauspicious events was the break¬
up of the Ottoman Empire in Asia as a consequence of its intervention
in the war of a.d. 1914-18 on what proved to be the losing side. Under
the Ottoman dispensation the Arab population of Palestine had been
insured against becoming the victims of Zionist ambitions to their
detriment thanks to the fact that the Muslim majority of the Palestinian
Arabs was part of the dominant Muslim community in an empire whose
integrity in Asia had hitherto been preserved substantially intact by an
interplay between the Ottoman Muslims’ collective strength and an
international balance of power. 1 Ever since the political control of
Palestine had passed out of Christian into Muslim hands as a result of
the Primitive Muslim Arab conquest in the seventh century of the
Christian Era, Jews had been free to resort to, and reside in, Palestine
for the purpose of religious exercises and studies; and since a.d. 1882 the
Ottoman Government had allowed the Zionists to found agricultural
settlements in the Palestinian country-side on a scale that was modest
enough to avoid the provocation of any alarm or resentment among the
Arab inhabitants of the country. 2 This Ottoman safeguard to the rights
and interests of the Palestinian Arabs was removed by the overthrow of
the Ottoman imperial rdgime.

The antecedent overthrow of the Romanov imperial regime in Russia
—likewise in consequence of defeat in the war of a.d. 1914-18—had
already removed another of the Palestinian Arabs’ safeguards; for, down
to a.d. 1914, the Russian people had continued to follow in large numbers
the traditional Christian practice—long since almost obsolete in the
West—of going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and the Russian
Imperial Government—which had identified itself with the Antisemitism
of the Western or semi-Westcrnized Christian majority in the popula¬
tion of the former United Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania since the lion’s
share of this vast area had become ‘the Jewish Pale’ of the Russian
Empire—had been intransigent in vetoing any inclination on the part of
its Western allies to grant satisfaction to Zionist aspirations in Palestine,

* This Ottoman insurance policy had cost the Muslim majority of the Palestinian
Arabs an expensive premium in the shape of military conscription into an Ottoman
Army in which the rate of mortality—from disease even more than from hostilities—
had been cruelly high. The Palestinian Arabs’ subsequent fate suggested that it had been
worth their while to pay even this price for the preservation of their existence.

* The flow of Jewish emigration from 'the Pale' into Palestine between a.d. 1882 and
A.D. 19x4 was a mere tricklecompared to ‘the immense stream which flowed into the
expanding centres of the World’s industry [in the Western countries]’ (Parkea, J.:
The Jeuiih Problem in the Modern World, 1st American cd. (New York 1946,
Oxford University Press), p. 66). By the time of the outbreak of war in A.D. 1914, there
were fifty-nine Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine with an aggregate population
of twelve or thirteen thousand. (See the list in Nawratzki, K.: Die Jildiiehe Kolonisation
Poldstinai (Munich 1914, Reinhardt), Anlagc 18. The figures of inhabitants given in this
table add up to only 10,105, But the figures for seven settlements arc missing.) The total
Jewish population of Palestine at the same date numbered about 8o,ooo, out of about
750,000 Palestinians of all faiths.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 303
on the ground that the transformation of Palestine into a Jewish national
state would desecrate a Holy Land which still meant to Russians all
that it had once meant to other Christians likewise. The Tsardom fell on
the 12th March, 1917; the Balfour Declaration was issued on the 2nd
November of the same year.

Another political factor which the First World War brought into play
was a competition between the belligerents in courting the sympathy of
Jewry. To win Jewish support—and, still more, to avert Jewish hostility
—was an object of great moment to both sides; for, imperfect though
the psychological emancipation of the Jewish diaspora in the West may
still have been at this date, their economic and political emancipation
had already gone far enough to give Jewry’s suffrages a substantial and
perhaps decisive weight in a trembling Western balance of international
power. The Jews were now an appreciable force in the domestic political
life of the Central and the Western European Powers alike, and of the
United States to a still greater degree; and the feelings of the American
Jewish community loomed large in the calculations of European bel¬
ligerents who had come to realize that the United States would have the
last word to speak in a European conflict and that this American last word
might be influenced appreciably by the views of Jewish American
citizens.

In the course of the thirty-six years ending in a . d . 1917 the Jews
throughout the World had come, with good reason, to look upon Russia
as being Jewry’s ‘Enemy Number One’, and, in the First World War,
Germany, as the protagonist on the anti-Russian side whose victorious
arms had liberated a large part of ‘the Pale* from an Antisemitic Russian
rule, stood to gain those world-wide Jewish sympathies which the West
European Powers stood to lose as Russia’s allies. After the German
Army had pushed the Russian Army back in a.d. 1915 to a line approxi¬
mating to the Russo-Polish political frontier of a.d. 1793, the German
General Staff gave American Jewish journalists opportunities of seeing
with their own eyes how the Russians had found vent for their rage at
their shattering defeat at German hands by discharging it on an innocent
and defenceless Jewish population in the territory that they had been
forced to evacuate. For the West European Powers—and for the United
States likewise, as soon as she became their co-belligerent—it was a
matter of urgency to outmatch this card which Germany had acquired
through conquering ‘the Pale’, and a trump card had been placed in
their hands by a British conquest of Palestine which put it in their power
to offer satisfaction to Zionist aspirations. The Western Powers were
tantalizingly inhibited from playing this Palestinian card so long as they
had any hope of keeping their Antisemitic Russian partner in the firing-
line ; and it is no wonder that the Balfour Declaration was published as
soon as the last Western hopes of further Russian military collaboration
had expired.

Great Britain's Responsibility for the Catastrophe in Palestine

In taking a measure so well calculated to help them to win a war in
which they were fighting for their lives, it is comprehensible that the

30 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

Western Powers should not have looked ahead beyond the hoped-for
achievement of victor}'. They were less blameworthy for making dubious
commitments concerning Palestine to Jews and Arabs while the First
World War was still being fought than they were for shirking their
consequent duty, in the subsequent interval of peace, to face the equivo¬
cal situation which they had created in Palestine under the stress of a
world war and to liquidate it at the earliest possible date with the least
possible injury and injustice to the parties to whom their war-time com¬
mitments had been made. The Western Power that bore the lion’s share
of the responsibility for the inter-war failure to retrieve the position in
Palestine was Great Britain, who, first as Occupying Power and then as
Mandatory, was conducting the administration of Palestine from a.d.
1917 to a . d . 1948.

Throughout those crucial thirty years the British attitude—common
to all parties and adopted by successive ministries—was one of culpably
wilful blindness, 1 The Palestine which the British had conquered from
the ‘Osmanlis in a.d. 1917-18 was a province of an Ottoman World in
which mixed populations had been exploding, with a fearful cost in
human suffering, ever since the extermination of the Muslim diaspora
intheMoreaby Greek Orthodox Christian insurgents in a.d. 1821. 2 Even
British statesmen who were ignorant of nineteenth-century Ottoman
history could not be unaware of the fate that had overtaken the Armen¬
ian diasporit in Anatolia in a.d. 1915; and, after that portent in this
adjacent Ottoman territory had failed to deter the British from embarking
in Palestine on the deliberate creation of a new explosive mixture of
mutually incompatible national ingredients, the fate that overtook the
Greek diaspora in Anatolia in a.d. 1922 might still have counselled them
to reconsider the Balfour Declaration before it was too late. A third
warning was given them by the explosion that inevitably followed in
Palestine itself in a.d. 1929. Yet, in spite of these awful object lessons,
British statesmanship doggedly kept Palestine headed for manifest
disaster while the local situation went from bad to worse until it got
completely out of hand as a result of the advent of the Nazis to power in
Germany, their unprecedentedly inhuman persecution of the Jews in the
Reich, and the extension of this campaign of ‘genocide’ to the rest of Con¬
tinental Europe after the outbreak of a Second World War in a.d. 1939.

From first to last, there was never a practicable plan in British minds
for peacefully stabilizing the explosively unstable situation in Palestine
which Britain had deliberately created. The British Government did not
attempt to stabilize even the respective numbers of the Arab and Jewish
elements in the population until the Jewish minority had been allowed
to become so large—‘approaching a third of the entire population of the
country’ 3 —that there was no longer any chance of its being willing to
remain a minority in a bi-national state and no longer any possibility of
such a state, if ever constituted on paper, finding it possible to govern it¬
self through the Western institution of majority rule. 4

1 See p. 290, n. 2, above. * See pp. 100-2. above.

3 United Kingdom Parliamentary Paper Cmd. 6019 of the 17th May. 1039. para. 6.

♦ See p. 305, n. 4, below.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS

3 °S

Though the Mandatory Power’s official apologists might offer juridical
proofs that British promises to Jews and Arabs in respect of Palestine
were not formally incompatible, it would have been difficult to argue
that the undeniably incompatible expectations which had been en¬
gendered by these British promises in Jewish and in Arab minds were not
legitimate inferences, on their part, from the British declarations. 1
Whatever an official British spokesman might say, or the Jewish Agency
profess, during the earlier phases of the mandatory regime, it was
psychologically impossible to promise the establishment in Palestine of
‘a national home’ for the Jewish people—specifically including the facili¬
tation of Jewish immigration and the encouragement of close settlement
by Jews on the land—without encouraging Zionists to look forward to
the establishment there of a Jewish national state, notwithstanding the
stipulation in the Balfour Declaration and in the Mandate that the rights
and position of other sections of the population should not be prejudiced,
and likewise impossible to promise ‘the development of self-governing
institutions’ 2 to a country in which the Arab clement in the population
was in an overwhelming majority, at the time when the mandate was
conferred and the terms of the mandate were worked out, 3 without
encouraging Palestinian Arabs to look forward to the establishment in
Palestine of an Arab national state, notwithstanding the stipulation in
the Mandate, as well as in the Balfour Declaration, requiring the
establishment in Palestine of a Jewish ‘national home’.

The object lesson of Turco-Greek and Turco-Armenian relations
during a century culminating in the two catastrophes of a . d . 1915 and
a . d . 1922 confuted in advance the Mandator)' Power’s official pious
belief that the mandatory regime would somehow miraculously save
Great Britain’s honour by engendering one day a self-governing bi¬
national Arab-Jewish Palestinian state. 4 In a memorandum of the 3rd

1 In the United Kingdom Parliamentary Paper Cmd. 6019 of the 17th May, 1939,
para. 3, the Mandatory* Power confessed that 'the Royal Commission [of a . d . 1936-7]
and previous commissions of enquiry’ had ‘drawn attention to the ambiguity of certain
expressions in the Mandate, such as the expression "a national home for the Jewish
people", and’ that they had ‘found in this ambiguity and in the resulting uncertainty
as to the objectives of policy a fundamental cause of unrest and hostility between Arabs
and Jews.’ 1 Mandate for Palestine, Article 2.

l The mandate for Palestine was conferred on Great Britain on the 25th April, 1920,
by the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers during the Conference of San Remo; the
final text of the instrument in which the mandate was embodied was dated the 24th
July, 1922; the mandate officially came into force on the 29th September, 1923. Accord¬
ing to a census taken by the Mandatory Power on the 23rd October, 1922, there were
in Palestine on that date 671,098 Arabs (including Matawilah, Druses, and Christians,
as well as Sunnis), 83,704 Jew*, and 2,290 others (Samaritans, Bahil‘is, Hindus, Sikhs)
in a total population of 757.*82 (Palestine Government: Report and General Abstractt

« ' the Census of 1922, p. 58). On this showing, the Arab majority in the population of
destine amounted to nearly 90 per cent, of the whole at the date when the second article
of the Mandate for Palestine was drafted.

« At as late a date as the 17th May, r 939 , when the hands of the clock of History were
indicating the approach of the eleventh hour, the United Kingdom Government were
still declaring that, apart from their specific obligation under the Mandate ‘to secure
the development of self-governing institutions in Palestine’, ‘they would regard it as
contrary to the whole spirit of the mandate system that the population of Palestine
should remain for ever under mandatory tutelage’. Yet, in the same paragraph of the
aame state paper (Cmd. 6019 of 1939, para. 8), they found themselves constrained to
confess that, while they desired 'to see established ultimately an independent Palestine
state ... in which the two peoples in Palestine, Arabs and Jews’, could 'share authority
in government in such a way that the essential interests of each’ would be ‘secured’, they

3 o 6 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

June, 1922, Sir Winston Churchill, as British Secretary of State for the
Colonies, had the hardihood to commit himself to the opinion that the
Balfour Declaration did ‘not contain or imply anything which need
cause either alarm to the Arab population of Palestine or disappointment
to the Jews'. The harsh truth was that, in issuing the Balfour Declaration
and subsequently undertaking a mandate for Palestine in which its terms
were embodied, Great Britain was condemning one or other of the two
communities concerned to suffer a fearful catastrophe in the same breath
in which she was undertaking to make herself responsible ‘for safe¬
guarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine,
irrespective of race and religion’.

In the light of sensational events in adjacent Ottoman territories it
could be predicted with assurance after a.d. 1915, and with double
assurance after a . d . 1922, that the mandatory regime in Palestine would
end in the death or eviction or subjugation of hundreds of thousands of
human beings. The only open question was whether these non-divinely
predestined victims were to be Arab or Jewish men, women, and
children; and the denouement in a.d. 1948-9 bore out the contentions
made in the Arab reply to the Churchill memorandum of a.d. 1922. It
was incontestable that, during the thirty years ending in the terminal
date of the British mandatory regime in a.d. 1948, the three hundred
thousand Jewish immigrants introduced into Palestine in the course of
that period entered the country ‘by the might of England against the
will of the people, who’ were ‘convinced that these’ had ‘come to strangle
them’; 1 and the event proved that this British action did in truth mean
the Palestinian Arabs’ ‘extinction sooner or later’, in spite of the clear
undertaking in the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate that nothing
should be done that might prejudice the civil and religious rights of
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

Germany’s and the United States' Responsibility for the Catastrophe in
Palestine

The perversely predestined catastrophe in Palestine in a . d . 1948 was
precipitated by three events. The first of these was the rise of the Jewish

were ‘unable at present to foresee the exact constitutional forms which government in
Palestine’ would ‘eventually take’ and (para. io(v)) were making ‘no proposals at this
stage regarding the establishment of an elective legislature’.

1 According to the United Kingdom Parliamentary Paper Cmd. 6019 of the 17th
May, 1939 . P«ra. 6, more than 100,000 Jews had immigrated into Palestine by that date
since the publication of the Churchill memorandum of the 3rd June, 1922, and the
population of the Jewish national home had risen to some 450,000 (nearly a third of the
total population of the country). According to the Government of Palestine, Statistical
Abstract, 1943 (Jerusalem 1944, Government Printing Press), p. 3, the period 1022 to
1942 saw a total increase of 400.618 in the Jewish population of Palestine, from 83,790
to 484.408 (29.9 per cent, of the total population of the country), and, of these 400,618
additional Jewish souls, no less than 305,803 were immigrants and no more than
94.815 were the fruit of natural increase. The total increase in the number of the
Palestinian Muslims during the same period was 406,115; of these, no less than 386,100
were the fruit of natural increase (thanks to the cessation of Ottoman military conscrip¬
tion and the improvement in public health under a British mandatory rdgime): and,
of the 20,015 souls, out of these 406,115, that were added to the Muslim population of
Palestine during these years from sources other than natural increase, no more than
10.315 were immigrants; for 9,700 of them were inhabitants of districts transferred to
Palestine from the Lebanon and Syria in a.d. 1923.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 307
community in the United States, subsequently to the Jewish influx from
the Russian Pale in and after a. d. I88I, 1 to a degree of economic and politi¬
cal power in American life at which the Jewish vote had become a force in
the arena of American domestic politics for whose support the two party
machines must eagerly compete, and which therefore neither of them
could afford to alienate. The second decisive event was the 'genocide’ of
the Jewish diaspord in Continental Europe at German Gentile hands in
a.d. 1933-45; the third was the outbreak of ‘a cold war’ between the
Soviet Union and the United States after the overthrow of Fascism by
the united efforts of Western Parliamentary Democracy and Communism
in the Second World War. None of these events had any intrinsic con¬
nexion with the issue between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, 2 yet, between
them, they had an effect that was as decisive as it was untoward and
inequitable on the course of this act in the tragedy.

There was neither justice nor expediency in the exaction from
Palestinian Arabs of compensation due to European Jews for crimes
committed against them by Western Gentiles. Justice required that
the debt to Continental European Jewry which the Western World had
incurred through the criminality of a Western nation should be assumed
by a defeated Germany’s victorious Western adversaries; and expediency
pointed in the same direction as justice; for the victorious Western
countries between them did possess the capacity—for which Palestine’s
resources were quite inadequate—of absorbing the European Jewish
survivors of the Furor Teutonicus without seriously deranging their own
domestic social equilibrium. On the 15th December, 1946, the General
Assembly of the United Nations Organization duly urged each of its
members to receive its fair share of non-repatriable persons for permanent
resettlement in its territory at the earliest possible time, 3 but this resolu¬
tion was not welcomed cither by the Jewish diaspork in the United
States or by the Zionists. The American Jews may have been moved
partly by the self-regarding consideration that even a moderate further
increase in their own numbers might prejudice their already delicate
relations with their Gentile fellow citizens, and the makers of Zionist
polity partly by a callous determination to turn the personal tribulations
of European Jewry to account for the promotion of Zionist political aims
in Palestine. Whatever the mixture of Jewish motives may have been,
Jewry made it clear that it had set its heart on a Jewish national state
in Palestine as an asylum for the remnant of the European diaspord;
and thereupon the Democratic and Republican parties in the United
States, and the United States and the Soviet Union in the United
Nations Organization, vied with one another in contending for Jewish
support by displaying a competitive zeal for furthering the fulfilment of

« Sec pp. 292 and 294, above.

* The rise and character of the National Socialist Movement in Germany and the
inauguration and terms of the Mandate in Palestine were, of course, indirectly connected
with one another in the sense that both the Mandate and National Socialism were out¬
comes of the defeat of the Quadruple Alliance in the First World War; but this rather
tenuous ultimate common origin was the only relation between them.

> United Nations: Resolutions adopted by the General Assembly. 23 rd October- 15 th
December, 1946 (Lake Success 1947. U.N.O.), Resolution No. 62(1), para, (e), on
p. 98.

3 o8 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Jewish aspirations, as Great Britain and Germany had contended for
Jewish support in the likewise critical years a.d. 1915-17.

Realpolitik —in the twofold form of a competition for the winning of
Jewish support both in the international struggle between the United
States and the Soviet Union and in the domestic struggle between the
Democratic and Republican parties in the United States—was not, of
course, the only motive that moved America to relieve Great Britain
unceremoniously of as much of the blood-guiltiness for the tragedy in
Palestine as she could manage at this late hour to transfer from the ex-
Mandatory Power’s head on to her own. 1 The American approach to the
Palestinian problem was, on the whole, less Machiavellian than it was
Quixotic. 2 While the Arab victims of the Palestinian tragedy were in¬
visible to most American eyes, the Jewish victims of the European
tragedy were brought alive to Gentile American imaginations by the
prominence in the United States of a Jewish diaspora which, had no
Arab counterpart there; and this vivid realization of the European Jews’
sufferings smote Gentile American consciences—mainly, no doubt,
because those sufferings had been inflicted by the American Gentiles’
German soi-disant fellow Christians, and partly perhaps also because the
American Gentiles were uneasily aware of a repressed yet unconscionable
vein of Antisemitism in their own hearts.

President Truman’s personal susceptibility to this popular American
confusion of mind and mixture of motives might go far to explain presi¬
dential interventions in the Palestinian imbroglio which would have been
utterly cynical if they had not been partially innocent-minded. The
Missourian politician-philanthropist’s eagerness to combine expediency
with charity by assisting the wronged and suffering Jews would appear
to have been untempered by any sensitive awareness that he was there¬
by abetting the infliction of wrongs and sufferings on the Arabs; and his
excursions into the stricken field in Palestine reminded a reader of the
Fioretti di San Francesco of the tragi-comic exploit there attributed to
the impetuously tender-hearted Brother Juniper, who, according to the
revealing talc, was so effectively moved by a report of the alimentary
needs of an invalid that he rushed, knife in hand, into a wood full of
unoffending pigs, and straightway cut off a live pig’s trotter to provide
his ailing fellow human being with the dish that his soul desired, with¬
out noticing that he was leaving the mutilated animal writhing in agony
and without pausing to reflect that his innocent victim was not either
the invalid’s property or his own. 3 It must be added that the American
repetition of this story included a sequel that was not to be found in the
Italian original. In the Fioretti there is no indication that the sufferings
of the victim of a holy man’s impulsive charity excited any human pity—

J For a British observer, this spectacle had the prim humour of the denouement of
R. L. Stevenson’s fantasia The Bottle Imp, in which the vial of wrath is eventually
carried off unconcernedly by the mate of an American ship.

1 This characteristically ‘Anglo-Saxon’ attitude of combining an unavowed yet patent
Machiavellianism with a suspect yet sincere Quixotry was displayed as grotesquely by
the British in and after the First World War as by the Americans after the Second World
War in the Palestinian policy of these two great English-speaking peoples.

J Fioretti di San Francesco d’Assisi: ‘Vita di Fratc Gincpro’, cap. i: 'Come Frate
Grnepro taglid il Piede ad uno Porco solo per darlo a uno Infermo’.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 309
for, when the owner of the unfortunate animal did eventually slaughter
it, he was concerned, not to put a suffering creature out of its misery, but
to atone, by making a feast for Brother Juniper and his brethren, for his
own ungodly indignation at the damage done to his property—whereas,
in the annals of the United Nations Organization, it is recorded that the
United States Government took the initiative in relieving the plight of
some 684,000 Palestinian Arab ‘displaced persons’ by providing half
the total sum that was estimated to be necessary for purposes of first aid
to these human victims of ‘Anglo-Saxon attitudes’.

The Retrospect and the Outlook

The consequent situation in Palestine was fraught with geographical,
historical, and psychological paradoxes. The one substantial piece of
Palestinian territory west of Jordan which the Zionist State of Israel had
not engulfed by the time in a.d. 1949 when Jewish-Arab hostilities in
Palestine were suspended was the Hill Country of Ephraim, which had
been the historic Israel’s first Palestinian foothold and their Samaritan
legatees’ last Palestinian stronghold. The core of the Zionist State’s
territory was the ci-devant land of the Philistines in the Shephelah, which
had never before been colonized by an Israelite or Jewish population and
which, during the thirteen centuries for which Philistines and Israelites
had lived in Palestine side by side, 1 had not even been united politically
with Ephraim or Judah save for a few brief periods, at long intervals, of
Philistine rule over Israel or Jewish rule over Philistia. On its two flanks
the Zionist Philistia Rediviva was reaching inland with its left arm into
‘Galilee of the Gentiles’, which had been forcibly converted to Judaism
less than a century before the beginning of the Christian Era, and with
its right arm into the Negeb in the track of the Philistines’ Chercthite
fellow invaders who had anticipated the Zionists in heading for ‘Aqabah. 2
In a.d. 1949, as in a.d. 135 and a.d. 70 and 586 b.c. and 721 B.c. and
732 B.C., a Palestinian community, uprooted from its native soil by a
military and political tornado, was facing the challenge of being scattered
abroad among the nations in order to show whether it would have the
spirit to preserve its identity in diaspora like Judah or would vanish like
Israel; but these twentieth-century Palestinian d&racines were Gentiles,
not Jews, while the invaders who had uprooted them were Jews, not
Gentiles. These geographical and historical paradoxes were the effects
of a psychological paradox that far surpassed them.

The paradox of Zionism was that, in its demonic effort to build a com¬
munity that was to be utterly Jewish, it was working as effectively for the
assimilation of Jewry to a Western Gentile World as the individual Jew
who opted for becoming a Western bourgeois ‘of Jewish religion’ or a
Western bourgeois agnostic. The historic Jewry was the diaspora, and
the distinctively Jewish ethos and institutions—a meticulous devotion
to the Mosaic Law and a consummate virtuosity in commerce and
finance—were those which the diaspora, in the course of ages, had

1 i.e. from an early date in the twelfth century b.c. to a.d. 135.

1 See VI. vii. 102, n. 1. and p. 338, n. 1, below.

310 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

wrought into social talismans endowing this geographically scattered
community with a magic capacity for survival. For good or for evil, by
the common consent of all first-hand witnesses, including Gentiles who
were fascinated by it and Jews who were repelled by it, this masterly
adaptation to a diasporan environment was the essence of ‘Jewishness’
in the universally accepted historical meaning of the term. Latter-day
Jewish Westernizers of the Liberal and the Zionist school alike were
breaking with this historic Jewish past; and Zionism’s significant differ¬
ence from Liberalism lay in making the breach more drastic.

In deserting the diaspork individually in order to lose himself in the
ranks of a Modern Western Gentile urban bourgeoisie, the Liberal
Jew was assimilating himself to a Gentile social milieu that had pre¬
viously gone far, on its side, to assimilate itself socially and psychologi¬
cally to the Jewish diaspord; in deserting the diaspord collectively in
order to build up a new nation, closely settled on the land, on the trail of
the Modern Western Protestant Christian pioneers who had created the
United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, the
Zionists were assimilating themselves to a Gentile social milieu which
had no counterpart in the life of a post-Exilic Jewry, and whose own
inspiration from the Old Testament was derived, not from Isaiah any
more than it was from Deutcro-Isaiah, but from the Books of Joshua
and Exodus.'

The Zionists’ audacious aim was to invert, in a new life of their own
making, all the distinctively Jewish characteristics enshrined in the
diaspora’s traditional life. They set out defiantly and enthusiastically to
turn themselves into manual labourers instead of brain workers, country¬
folk instead of city-dwellers, producers instead of middlemen, agricul¬
turists instead of financiers, warriors instead of shopkeepers, terrorists
instead of martyrs, aggressively spirited Semites instead of peaceably
abject non-Aryans; and this Nietzschean revaluation of all traditional
Jewish values, for destruction as well as for construction, for evil as well
as for good, was directed towards the horizon-filling narrow-hearted aim
of making themselves sons of a latter-day Eretz Israel in Palestine that
was to be 'as Jewish as’ England ‘was English’, 2 instead of remaining the

1 The sanction derived by Bible-Christian supplantcrs of American Indians, African
Bantu, and Australian Blackfellows from the Israelites’ biblically recorded conviction
that God had instigated them to exterminate the Canaanites has been noticed in II. i.
at x-27. We may now go on to observe that the divers Neo-Canaanites victimized by the
divers Neo-Israelites were not all equally tractable. Fortune perhaps rather than fore¬
sight had provided the British Israelite invaders of North America and Australia with
local Canaanites who were sufficiently feeble and few to allow of their being rapidly
reduced to a residue which could be parked in reservations. The South African Dutch
Israelites’ Bantu Canaanites, the British Israelites’ 'Wild Irish’ Canaanites, and the
Prussian Israelites’ Polish Canaanites could not be disposed of either so expeditiously or
so conveniently as the North American Indians and the Australian Blackfellows. The
Bantu’s primitive feebleness in culture was made up for by their strength in numbers,
and the numerical weakness of the Poles and the Irish by their inheritance of a high cul¬
ture. The Zionist Israelites’ Arab Canaanites combined the cultural strength of the Irish
and the Poles with the numerical strength of the Bantu. The Palestinian Arabs were
heirs of the Arabic Civilization and members of an Arabic-speaking society whose
geographical domain stretched away beyond the bounds of Palestine as far as Mosul,
Morocco. Zanzibar, and Java. The Arabs would, in fact, be almost as difficult to wipe
off the map as the Chinese or the Hindus-

* A phrase guoted by Sir Winston Churchill in his memorandum of the 3rd June,
1922(seep. 296, n. 3, above).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 311
step-sons of a New York, London, Manchester, and Frankfort that were
not more Jewish than Bombay was Parsee or Ispahan Armenian.

Within the thirty years a.d. 1918-48 the Zionist pioneers in Palestine
duly achieved this almost incredible tour de force of minting a fresh type
of Jew in whom the child of the diaspora was no longer recognizable.
The image and superscription on this new human coinage was not
Hilld's but Caesar’s. The Janus-figurc—part American farmer-tech¬
nician, part Nazi sicaritis —was of a characteristically Western stamp.
Yet, w-hile a collective Westernization in a Modern Western nationalist
mould was the Zionists’ triumphantly achieved objective, the lode-stone
that had drawn them so forcefully to the Westernizing goal that they had
reached through a feat of left-handed self-transfiguration was ‘the real
presence’ of the Holy Land. To judge by the unquestionable potency of
this psychological factor in enabling the Zionist pioneers to accomplish
what they did accomplish in Palestine in this generation, we may surmise
that the annals of Zionism would have been less dynamic, and the entries
against its name in the Book of Judgement less deeply scored on both
sides of the account, if the scene of Zionist exploits had been an East
African Arcadia and not a Palestinian Phlegra. Yet this mystical feeling
for an historical Eretz Israel, which inspired the Zionist pioneers with the
spiritual power to move mountains, was entirely derived from a dias-
poran orthodox theology that convicted the Zionists of an importunity
which verged upon impiety in their attempt to take out of God’s hands
the fulfilment of God’s promise to restore Israel to Palestine on God’s
own initiative.

What judgement on the secular Zionist substitute for the diaspora’s
religious hope would be delivered by the mind of an orthodox Jewish
devotee w-hile he was wailing at the retaining-wall of an annihilated
Temple as a testimony of Israel’s contrition and as an appeal to God to
hasten the promised time when He would show a penitent Israel his
mercy by restoring Israel to Palestine in God’s own way? And what
action w-ould a Zionist Israeli Ministry of the Interior instruct its police
to take against a Jew who persisted in wailing after Israel had been
restored by force of Zionist human arms ? Would this traditional Jewish
religious rite be proscribed by Zionist political authorities as a provoca¬
tive act of high treason—constructively a pro-Arab demonstration—
against the accomplished fact of a profanely man-made Palestinian
Zionist State? 1

The practical achievement of the Zionist Movement’s political aims
had in fact brought a new Jewish problem on to the stage of history. The
familiar issue between Jew and Gentile would be duplicated henceforth
by an at first sight novel issue between an old-fashioned Syriac-minded
Jewish diaspora in the United States and a new-fangled Western-
minded Jewish nation in Palestine. The metamorphosis which Zionism
had induced in its adherents clinched the demonstration—already im¬
plicit in the un-Jcwishncss of the ethos of the surviving ‘Jews in
Fastnesses’ 2 —that Jewishness, in the accepted historical meaning of the

« A prudent Jewish wailer would stay on the Jordonian side of the line by which
Jerusalem was now partitioned. * See II. ii. 402-12.

312 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
term, was not the indelible brand of a particular physico-psychic race
but was the plastic impress of a particular psychological response to a
particular social challenge. Within the span of a single generation the
different response to a different challenge that had been made by the
Zionist pioneers in Palestine had produced a striking differentiation of
Sthos and type; 1 and this was not, after all, a unique occurrence. In a
neighbouring province of the Ottoman World in the course of the
century that had elapsed between the establishment of a Greek national
state in a.d. 1821-29 and the extermination of the Ottoman Greek
diaspork in a.d. 1922, the ‘Yunani’ citizens of a new Westernizing
Kingdom of Greece had likewise become noticeably differentiated from
their former fellow members of a Millet-i-Rum who had continued to be
ra'iyeh of the Porte. In the measure in which the citizens of a Zionist
Israeli state succeeded in assimilating themselves collectively to con¬
temporary' American and German Gentiles, they would become pro¬
gressively alienated from the members of a Western Jewish diaspora
from which the Zionist Israel had sprung. The issue arising from this
estrangement between a traditional Jewry and its changeling offspring
might prove to be a difficult one, since, even after its extermination in
Continental Europe, the diaspora remained several times more numer¬
ous, and many times more wealthy, than a Palestinian Israeli nation
could ever hope to become. Indeed, for as far as could be seen ahead, the
financial and political sympathy and support of the Jewish diaspora in
the United States would continue to be a Palestinian Israel’s life-line; and
it remained to be seen for how long a time these generous foreign sub¬
scribers to Israel, who, besides being Jews, were also American citizens,
would remain content to submit to ‘taxation without representation’.

In its diminutiveness, its fanaticism, and its Ishmaclitish enmity with
its neighbours the new Zionist Israel in Palestine was a reproduction of
the Modern Western national state that, in its faithfulness, verged on
being a parody; and it was a misfortune, for both Jewry and the World,
that this statelet—begotten of so much idealism, self-sacrifice, crime,
injustice, and suffering—should have seen the light at a moment when it
might be hoped that the species of community of which this was the
youngest member was at last approaching its eclipse. This hope could
be cherished mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian
Era because a Modern Western Nationalism was an archaistic throw¬
back to a rustic parochial past state of the Western Society which was
being stamped as an untenable anachronism, at the very time when it
was being revived, by the simultaneous flowering of a Modern Western
technology which was expanding the range of Western life in all its
aspects from a parochial to an oecumenical scale. 1

On the morrow of a Second World War the existing national states,
from the smallest to the largest, were striving—with a futile obstinacy
which they might have spared themselves if they had taken to heart the
object lesson once contrived by King Canute—to keep at bay the ocean

1 See Simon, E.: 'What Price Israel’s “Normalcy"?’ in Commentary, April 1949
(New York 1949, American Jewish Committee).

1 See IV. iv. 169 and 179-S0.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 3 *3

of oecumenicalism that the roaring gale of technological progress was
driving against their frail and tortuous dykes. They were piling exchange-
controls on customs-barriers, immigration-restrictions on exchange-
controls, and police-cordons on immigration-restrictions, without a
prospect of being able to do more than vexatiously delay the irresistible
progress of a tide that was carrying human affairs towards world unity.
The antiquated patch-work of ghetto-like nation-states, which the air¬
man still saw flickering below him on the face of a rapidly coalescing
World, was assuredly destined to be submerged under a flood whose
surface would show the shot-silk sheen of communities—scattered
Jewish-fashion—that had come to be geographically intermingled with¬
out losing their distinctive identities. In a World that had been unified by
Western technology in spite of itself, the institutional future seemed
likely to lie far less with the Western institution of the national state than
with the Syriac institution of the millet; and, while the architects of a
constitution for the World might find useful ideas for the construction
of their basement in the work of the fathers of the Constitution of the
United States, the classic organization of the millet system in the
Ottoman Empire by the genius of Mchmcd the Conqueror might prove
to be a more fruitful source of inspiration for the design of the living-
rooms in this promised house of many mansions. 1

6. The Modern West and the Far Eastern and Indigenous American

Civilizations

The Perils of Ignorance

The living civilizations whose encounters with the Modern West we
have been surveying up to this point have all been societies that were
within close range of the Western Society’s radiation; and all of them
had already had experience of the Western Society before they began to
be affected by the impact of the Western culture in its modern phase.
The Jewish diaspora had been geographically intermingled with the
Western body social since Western Christendom’s first emergence out
of a post-Hellenic social interregnum, and even the Hindu World had
been brought into touch with the West through Muslim intermediaries
before the Modern Western pioneers of oceanic navigation established a
direct contact with the Hindus by outflanking the Islamic World on the
south through their circumnavigation of Africa. By contrast, the exis¬
tence of the West was still quite unknown to the Transatlantic civili¬
zations in the New World, and all but unknown to the Far Eastern
civilizations in China and Japan, down to the moment when the Modern
Western pioneer navigators impinged on these more remote societies
likewise in the course of an oceanic exploration of the surface of the
planet which took barely half a century (circa a . d . 1492-1542)* to range
almost as widely as the ubiquitous Ocean itself.

1 A comment by Dr. James Parkes on this judgement of the present writer’s will be
found on pp. 706-7. below.

1 Japan, which was the last new world to be discovered by the Western oceanic
pioneers during their half-century' of world-wide exploration, was reached by the
Portuguese in a.d. 1542-3. The Teppo-ki, a chronicle written in Satsuma between the
years a.d. 1596 and a.d. 1614, gives the 23rd September, 1543, as the date of the first

3H ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

This ignorance explains the reason for the apparently paradoxical
fact that the remoter civilizations showed, at the first encounter, a greater
readiness to open their arms to the Modern West than was shown at the
time by the Modern West’s better informed next-door neighbours. For
the Far East and for the New World the Modern West had the attractive¬
ness of novelty; and the curiosity which the advent of the Western
‘Martians’ aroused there was not tempered by any pre-existing hostility
or even suspicion. On the other hand in Jewish, Eastern Orthodox
Christian, and Muslim hearts and minds the dominant reaction to the
impact of the Modern West was not an innocently unsuspecting curiosity
but a sceptically watchful aversion implanted by lively and painful
memories of a previous encounter with the same Western Christendom
in the medieval phase of its history. 1 These neighbours of the West
remembered her, since the time of the Crusades, as a militantly aggres¬
sive society whose aggressiveness had been aggravated by a fanatical
zeal to impose on all Mankind her local Western version of Christianity.
Accordingly, all these neighbours of the West continued to keep her at
arm’s length so long as the fire of fanaticism was still showing its baleful
red light over the Western horizon.

The first effect of the internal explosion which fractured the medieval
unity of the Western Christian Church in the second generation of the
modem phase of Western history was to raise still higher the already
high temperature of the Western religious furnace; and, while Catholic
and Protestant Modern Western Christians were directing part of their
fire against one another in the Early Modern Western Wars of Religion,
this fratricidal strife still left an ample margin of Western bigotry to
spare for indulging a still unabated intolerance towards non-Western
religious faiths. The neighbouring societies accordingly bided their time
till the inconclusive destructiveness of the Western Wars of Religion
had reduced the temperature of Western fanaticism by evoking a revul¬
sion against Religion itself in Western hearts and minds; and, as we have
seen, the reception of the Modem Western culture by Jews, Orthodox
Christians, and Muslims did not begin until this alien Western way of life
was able to offer itself to them in a secularized form—with Technology
enthroned in Religion’s former place at the apex of the Western pyramid
of values—as the result of a momentous spiritual revolution within the
bosom of the Western Society itself during the later decades of the
seventeenth century of the Christian Era. Less prudence in dealing with
the importunate Western stranger at the gate was shown by the Far
Eastern and indigenous American civilizations. So far from waiting for
the abatement of a Western religious fanaticism of which they had not
been forewarned by any past experience of it, they laid themselves open
to the impact of the West in its Early Modern phase, when its traditional
religious aggressiveness was still in the ascendant.

In the first half of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era, when the
ocean-faring Westerners first appeared above their horizon, these four

PortuRuete landfall in Japan (Boxer, C. R.: The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-
J650 (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1951, University of California Press), pp. 23 and 26).

* Sec pp. 277-S0, above, and 346-403, below.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 315
relatively remote societies were all in a more or less unhealthy social
condition. All, so far as the latter-day historian can judge, were by
then already in decline, and some of them had already travelled far
along the road towards disintegration. The Japanese and Central
American societies were both at the climax of the second paroxysm of
a Time of Troubles which portended the imminence of a universal
state; the Andean and Chinese civilizations were both already in the
universal state phase. The Incaic Empire, when Pizarro smote it, was in
what might be described in Hellenic terminology as a ‘post-Trajanic’
condition of lassitude due to a bout of over-exertion. In annexing the
domain of the Karas in Ecuador to the Empire of the Incas in Peru, the
Emperor Tupac Yupanqui (imperabat circa a.d. 1448-82) had taxed
the Andean Society's resources and had bequeathed to his successor
Huayna Capac an intractable legacy of political unrest which eventually
played into the hands of the Spanish aggressors from the other side of the
planet. 1 As for the Chinese Society of that date, it was still farther gone
than the Andean in the stage of its social decay. An alien universal state
imposed by the Mongols had been overthrown by a ‘Zealot’-minded
indigenous reaction, and the resulting Ming regime in its turn had
already passed its zenith by the time when the Modern Western
occan-farcrs made their first landfall on China’s southern coast.

Thus the Far Eastern and the American pair of civilizations were both
in poor condition for coping with the West in its still bigoted Early
Modern phase; yet, in the event, the two stories took sharply different
turns. The American civilizations were as unsuccessful as the Far
Eastern civilizations were successful in mastering a formidably difficult
situation.

The Fate and Future of the Indigenous American Civilizations

The Spanish conquerors of the Central American and Andean worlds
immediately overwhelmed their ill-equipped and unsuspecting victims
by force of arms, as the contemporary Dutch and English pioneers of
Arctic exploration were able to club to death whole droves of puffins and
penguins which were incapable of resisting their human assailants and
yet made no move to escape them because this was their first encounter
with Mankind and they had therefore still to learn by cruel experience
that Man was the most murderous wild beast on the face of the planet.
At this first impact the indigenous American societies were submerged.
The alien invaders virtually exterminated those elements in the popula¬
tion that were the depositories of the indigenous cultures; they sub¬
stituted for them an alien dominant minority by sowing the conquered
territories thick with urban colonies of Spanish settlers; 1 and they re¬
duced the rural population to the status of an internal proletariat of
the victorious Western Christian Society by putting their labour at the
disposal of Spanish economico-religious entrepreneurs on the under¬
standing that these planter-missionaries would make it part of their
business to convert their human flocks to the Roman Catholic form of

Sec V. vi. 193.

* See VI. vU. 135-

3 i6 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Christianity. 1 The Spaniards’ suppression of the indigenous civilizations
of the Americas was in fact a barbaric counterpart of the Macedonians’
suppression of the indigenous civilizations of Egypt and South-Western
Asia after the domain of the Achacmcnian Empire had been conquered
for Hellenism by Alexander the Great.

In either case it looked, during the first chapter of the story, as if the
culture of the subjugated society had been, not just temporarily overlaid,
but permanently obliterated. In the Hellenic instance, however, the
later chapters of the story show the submerged Oriental cultures sur¬
prisingly reasserting themselves after the lapse of many centuries and
eventually expelling the intrusive Hellenic Civilization by force of arms
in a Blitzkrieg in which the feats of Alexander’s Macedonians were
emulated, after the passage of a millennium, by the Primitive Muslim
Arabs. In another cycle of history an Arabic Muslim Society that had
been overwhelmed by the Ottoman arms of Sultan Selim the Grim, in
the same generation that had seen the Spanish conquest of the Americas,
subsequently succeeded in shaking off the ascendancy of an Iranic
Muslim culture, which the Ottoman conquest had carried with it, after
a bondage that had lasted for the shorter yet still impressive term of
four hundred years. 2 These other instances, in which the whole story
was known to a twentieth-century Western historian, would counsel
him to beware of jumping to the conclusion that the apparent annihila¬
tion of the Central American and Andean civilizations by the Modern
West at its first impact was the whole story of these two encounters.

Even if the fully unfolded talcs of the encounter between the Arabic
and the Iranic Civilization and the encounter between the Hellenic
Civilization and its Oriental contemporaries had not stood on record
in the twentieth-century Western historian’s archives, the history of
Mexico since a.d. 1910 might have suggested to him that the indigenous
civilizations of the Americas might reassert themselves, not, perhaps,
as separate cultures, yet at least as distinctive variations on a Modern
Western cultural theme. 3 In the present writer’s generation this pos¬
sibility was already discernible; but it was then still so embryonic that,
even if it could be surmised that a second chapter in the history of the
encounters between the Modern West and the indigenous civilizations
of the Americas would eventually unfold itself, the twentieth-century
historian must resign himself to leaving the writing of this story to
Posterity while he turned his own attention away from speculations
about the ultimate fate of the submerged Central American and Andean
worlds to the more profitable study of an already current second chapter
in the history of the encounters between the Modern West and the two
Far Eastern civilizations.

Chinese and Japanese Reactions to the Impact of an Early Modern West

Unlike the Central American and Andean societies, the Chinese and
Japanese societies succeeded in holding their own against the West in its
Early Modern Phase. Instead of being overwhelmed, they survived the

1 The institution of the tveomienda has been touched upon in VI. vii. 145.

2 See IV. iv. 1x3-14. 3 See IV. iv. 79-81.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 317
deadly peril, to which they were exposed by their initial ignorance, of
surrendering to the attractiveness of a strange presence of which they
knew no evil. They managed with impunity to weigh the Western
Civilization in the balance, find it wanting, make up their minds to cast
it out, and muster the necessary force for putting into effect a considered
policy of virtual non-intercourse. The sequel, however, had revealed, by
the time of writing mid-way through the twentieth century, that this
mastery which the Far East had displayed at its first encounter with the
West was not the whole story but was merely the first chapter of it.

In breaking off relations with the West in the form in which the West
had presented itself to them in its Early Modern phase, the Chinese
and Japanese had not disposed of ‘the Western Question’ once for all;
for the West did not remain rooted to the spot on which it had been
standing at the moment when the Far East had dismissed it. The West
proceeded thereafter to put itself through the spiritual revolution that
opened a new chapter in Modern Western history at the turn of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and, in now substituting Techno¬
logy for Religion as the highest value, in Western estimation, in the
Western cultural scale, it reopened 'the Western Question’ for Far
Eastern hermit kingdoms with an importunity to which they could not
be for long impervious. In abandoning its traditional insistence that aliens
must become converts to some Western form of religion as a condition
sine qua non for being given the freedom of the Western Society, the
West was jettisoning the bigotry that had previously made it appear
repulsively menacing in Far Eastern eyes, while, conversely, in placing
its treasure henceforward in Technology and diverting its psychic
energy to this field from its repellent traditional aim of converting Man¬
kind to Western Christianity by force, the West was launching itself on
a course of technological progress that was rapidly to eclipse its own or
any other society’s previous achievements in this line; and a Western
technological superiority which, at the earlier encounter, had struck Far
Eastern observers of it as being formidably attractive was now raised
to successive higher degrees of potency until the Far Eastern peoples,
like their Hindu, Muslim, and Orthodox Christian contemporaries,
found themselves confronted with a choice between mastering this
superlative Western technology or succumbing to it.

From this point onwards the experience of the Far Eastern societies
in their dealings with the West was the same as that of the other living
non-Wcstcm civilizations; the distinctive feature in the Far Eastern
case was that this encounter with the Modern West in its latter-day
secularized form was the Far East’s second meeting with the Modern
West, and not its first; and, for a student of encounters between civiliza¬
tions, it is interesting to study the points of likeness and difference
between these two successive collisions of the same pair of Far Eastern
civilizations with a Western Society which, in the interval between the
two acts, had deliberately withdrawn its treasure from Religion and re¬
invested it in mundane values.

In this Far Eastern drama the Chinese and Japanese dramatis personae
behaved alike in some ways and in other ways diversely. A striking point

318 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
of likeness was that in the second act the reception of a secularized
Modern Western culture was initiated in both China and Japan from
below upwards, in spite of the fact that in the middle of the nineteenth
century, which was the time when this movement started in both
societies, either of them was embodied politically in an indigenous uni¬
versal state—China in the Manchu Empire and Japan in the Tokugawa
Shogunate. The failure of both the Ch’ing rdgime in China and the
Tokugawa regime in Japan to take the lead in initiating the process of
Westernization at this stage stands out in contrast to the course of
events in the corresponding chapters of Russian and Ottoman history,
in which the reception of a secularized version of the culture of the
Modern West was imposed on the people from above downwards by
their rulers, instead of being forced upon the rulers by the peoples from
below upwards. Thus at the opening of this chapter the histories of
China and Japan followed an identical distinctive course. On the other
hand the nineteenth-century Japanese Westernizing movement quickly
parted company with the contemporary movement in China by changing
over into the Petrine Russian rhythm; and the sixteenth-century
Westernizing movements in the two Far Eastern societies had taken
different courses from the outset. In their tentatively accorded and
subsequently revoked reception of a still unsecularized Modern Western
culture, the initiative had come from above downwards in a Chinese
Society that was then already embodied in a universal state and from
below upwards in a Japanese Society that was then still being racked by
the last and worst paroxysm of a Time of Troubles.

The charts of the two Far Eastern societies’ respective reactions to the
Modern West will also be found to differ in their general conformation
when we plot them out over a span of four centuries extending from the
date of initial contact in the first half of the sixteenth century of the
Christian Era down to the time of writing mid-way through the twentieth
century. The Chinese curve comes out relatively smooth and the Japanese
curve relatively jagged. By comparison with the corresponding Chinese
reactions, the two successive receptions of the Modem Western culture
in Japan, and the intervening rejection there of the earlier of the two
versions in which this culture successively presented itself, all went to
extremes, and the two successive reversals of policy—from reception
to rejection in the seventeenth century and from rejection to reception
in the nineteenth century'—were relatively abrupt. The Chinese never
went so far as the Japanese in surrendering themselves to the Modem
Western culture on cither occasion 1 or in insulating themselves from
contact with the West in the intervening stage of anti-Western xeno-

1 In the earlier of the two encounters the Japanese were far more receptive of an
Early Modem Western culture than the Chinese were, whereas the Westerners in that
age were far more receptive of the Chinese culture than they were of the Japanese
(Boxer, C. R.: The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1630 (Berkeley and Los Angeles
I 9 SI. University of California Press), pp. 208-9). In *•!>• *547 ordinary Japanese house¬
holders in the principality of Satsunia on the Island of Kyushu were literally opening
their door* to tne Portuguese by inviting them into their homes as guests (ibid., p. 209).
On the other hand in a.d. 1613 a Portuguese Jesuit belonging to the China mission, in a
letter to General Aquaviva, gave it as his opinion that the Japanese members of the
Society of Jesus, though virtuous, were not so Aportuguesados as the Chinese members
(ibid., p. 219).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 319
phobia; and the reversals of policy that were decreed in Japan by the
fiat of a dictator or by the verdict of a revolution were allowed in China
to work themselves out more gradually and more spontaneously.

Though in both Far Eastern societies the Early Modern Western
Christian missionaries made converts who eventually proved their
sincerity in the hour of trial by sacrificing their lives rather than obey
an omnipotent government’s command to renounce their exotic adopted
new faith, the dominant motives in both societies for tentatively embrac¬
ing the Early Modern Western Christian culture were not religious but
secular. In the sixteenth century both the Chinese Imperial Court at
Peking and the Japanese parochial princelings on the Island of Kyushu
put up with a religious propaganda which they found boringly unconvinc¬
ing and distastefully bigoted 1 for the sake of material benefits which the
Roman Catholic Christian missionaries had it in their power to bestow
either directly, through their own personal attainments in the field of
profane knowledge, or indirectly through their influence over their lay
fellow Westerners,

In this chapter of the story the Chinese Imperial Court’s cultivation
of the Jesuits was less utilitarian or more frivolous—in whichever of the
two lights we may prefer to regard it—than the contemporary cultivation
of them in Japan. In Chinese minds the dominant incentive was curiosity;
and, though, in their curiosity about sixteenth-century Western fire¬
arms, the Chinese as well as the Japanese had practical considerations
in view, the Ming regime’s desire to fortify its tottering authority by
equipping itself with these new-fangled weapons was far less intense than
the eagerness of contemporary Japanese war-lords to master a new
military technique which might play a decisive part in the desperate
final round of the struggle between them for the prize of becoming the
founder of a Japanese universal state . 2

Nor did the Ming or Manchu Imperial Government see in the develop¬
ment of trade through Western middlemen 3 those dazzling prospects of

* The Western Roman Catholic Christian missionaries alienated the Japanese by their
intolerance (Murdoch, J.: History of Japan, vol. ii (Kobe 1903, Japan Chronicle), p.
65), and the political awkwardness of this Early Modem Western religious ethos is con¬
jectured, by one Late Modern Western historian, to have been Hideyoshi’s main motive
in proscribing them (ibid., p. 378). In Hideyoshi’s decree of the 25th July, 1587, banish¬
ing the Jesuits from Japan, the continued sojourn of non-missionary Western visitors
was expressly authorized (Boxer, C. R.: The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650
(Berkeley and Los Angeles 1951, University of California Press), pp. 147-8).

1 The first sen-ice sought by the Japanese from the castaways of a.d. 1542-3 (Sansom,
G. B.: Japan, A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press), p. 406), who were
their first Portuguese visitors, was to teach the Japanese armourers how to make arque¬
buses (Murdoch, J.: History 0/Japan, vol. ii (Kobe 1903, Japan Chronicle), pp. 33-34).
By the beginning of the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Prince Otamo of the
principality of Bungo in Kyushu, who became a convert to Christianity in a.d. 1578
(ibid., pp. 77 and 102), was in possession of fire-arms, including artillery (ibid., p. 98).
The manufacture, as well as the use, of small arms established itself in Japnn very
rapidly, but artillery did not come to play as important a part in Japanese as in Western
warfare, and the art of cannon-founding did not m?ke much headway in Japan (Boxer,
op. cit., pp. 97 and 206-7).

1 The business that the Portuguese new-comers found for themselves in the Far
East was an exchange, not of Western commodities for Far Eastern, but of Chinese for

J apanese. The Portuguese trade with Japan was based on the Portuguese settlements in
ukien and Kwanetung, where the Portuguese merchants purchased silk goods for
export to Japan with Japanese silver (Boxer, op. cit., pp. 92 and 109-10). The English
and the Spaniards failed to elbow their way into the Japan trade because they failed to

320 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
commercial profits that excited Japanese cupidity. 1 Towards the close of
the sixteenth century it looked as if the adoption by the Japanese of the
contemporary Western art of war and their engagement in commerce
with Western traders might draw Japan at this stage out of the ambit of
the Far Eastern Society into the ambit of a Western Society which had
made itself ubiquitous by conquering the Ocean. Before the advent of the
Western ocean-farers in the Far East, the Japanese had already taken to
the sea in a counter-stroke to the abortive attempts of the Mongols to
invade Japan in a.d. 1274 and in a.d. 1281.* The Japanese had been making
piratical descents on the coasts of China since a.d. 1369, 3 and, w'hen, after

win a footing in China (ibid., pp. 300-1). After the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries the Portuguese shippers began to feel the competition of the Japanese and
Chinese, who by this time had taken to shipping Chinese silk to Japan in Japanese and
Chinese bottoms. Japanese ocean-faring ships are known to have been licensed for over¬
seas trade by Hideyoshi as early as A.D. 1592 (ibid., pp. 261-2), and, during the forty
years or so during which such licences continued to be issued, 182 voyages were made—
mostly to Indo-China, though there were also many sailings to Manila (30 between a . d .
1604 and a . d . 1616) (ibid., pp. 263-4). These Japanese ‘red-seal’ ships were originally
required by Japanese law to carry Portuguese pilots, but they soon leamt to navigate for
themselves as far as Malacca (ibid., p. 265). In the art of ship-building, however, the

B janese remained inferior to the Portuguese, Chinese, and Koreans (ibid., pp. 266-7).

A.D. 1612 the Japanese imported 5,000 quintals of Chinese silk from China and
Manila in Japanese bottoms, while in the same year only 1,300 quintals were imported
into Japan in the Portuguese Great Ship (ibid., p. 296). By this time the Portuguese—
and likewise the interloping Dutch—were also feeling the effect* of an increasing Chinese
competition in the silk trade between China and Japan (ibid., pp. 299-300). After the
suppression, in a . d . 1633-6, of Japan's overseas trade in Japanese bottoms by the
Tokugawa regime, and the permanent interdiction of Portuguese trade with Japan by
the decree of the 5th July, 1639, Japan’s trade with China was carried on by the Chinese
and the Dutch till it wet eventually killed by the establishment of a native silk industry
in Japan (ibid., pp. 288-9).

1 In the principality of Hirado in Kyushu Christianity was favoured on commercial
considerations (Murdoch, op. cit., voL ii, p- 54), and, in general, the reception with
which the Christian missionaries met at Japanese hands varied in accordance with
Japanese estimates of the prestige of the missionaries in the eyes of the Portuguese mer¬
chants (ibid., p. 60; Boxer, op. cit.,p. 104). The parochial princelings competed with
one another in trying to attract missionaries with a view to attracting trade (Murdoch,
op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 82-83). This was also one potent motive for conversions, and
apostasy followed when trade did not (ibid., p. 87). The daimyo of Hirado subsequently
welcomed the Protestant Dutch and English traders who arrived in the wake of the
Portuguese, because he preferred Western trade unencumbered with Western religion
(ibid., pp. 470-1). Fear of losing Portuguese trade deterred Hideyoshi from pressing
the execution of his edict of the 25th July, 1587, ordering Christian missionaries to
leave Japan but allowing Portuguese business men to stay (ibid., pp. 243 and 252).
Hideyoshi’s successor,Tokugawa Ieyasu, appointed Hideyoshi’s Jesuit interpreter Father
Joio Rodriguez as his own commercial agent at Nagasaki for trading there on his account
with the annual Portuguese ship (Boxer, op. cit., p. 182).

In A.n. 1599 Ieyasu tried to attract Spanish trade to Japan en route from the Philippines
to Mexico, and to obtain the services of Spanish shipwrights and miners (Murdoch,
op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 458-9), but the Spaniards did not care to take up the commercial open¬
ings offered to them in the Kwanto (ibid., p. 463). In a treaty concluded on the 4th July,
1610, with an ex-govcmor-gencral of the Philippines who had been shipwrecked on the
coast of Japan in the preceding year, Ieyasu conceded far-reaching Spanish demands
as his quid pro quo for obtaining the services of Spanish technicians. His aims were to
develop Japan’s foreign trade, build up a Japanese merchant marine, and exploit Japan’s
mineral resources (ibid., pp. 478-80). The offensive in breaking off commercial relations
between Japan and the West was taken on the Western and not on the Japanese side.
Circa a.d. 1614 the Japanese, together with all other foreigners, were forbidden to trade
with the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain (ibid., p. 603), and Japanese efforts to obtain
a relaxation of this veto were unsuccessful (ibid., p. 606). This previous rebuff of the
Japanese by the Spaniards may go far to explain the anti-Spanish measures taken by
the Bakufu in a.d. 1624 (see p. 323. n. 3, below). * See IV. iv. 93.

J See Soothill, W. E.: China and the West (Oxford 1925, University Press), pp. 75-
76. This scourge of Japanese, piracy at China’s expense continued to grow worse as,
in Japan, the Time of Troubles approached its climax. The worst years of all were a.d.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 321

the suppression of Japanese piracy by Hidcyoshi, 1 Japanese seamen fol¬
lowed the example of the Western new-comers by taking to trade, 2 they
rapidly extended the range of their maritime activities over the Pacific
as far afield as the Straits of Malacca in one direction 3 and the Spanish
Viceroyalty of Mexico in another. 4

The converse side of the picture was that, by the turn of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, a Japan whose political unification by indi¬
genous military force was then still incomplete and insecure had come to
be perilously exposed to the danger of having political unity imposed on
her from abroad at the eleventh hour, as it had been imposed on the
Central American World, at the ruthless hands of alien conquistadores.
The Spanish conquest of the Philippines in a . d . 1565-71, the union of
the Portuguese with the Spanish Crown in a . d . 1581, and the Dutch
conquest of Formosa in a . d . 1624 were object lessons of the fate which
might befall another group of West Pacific islands with which the
Portuguese had been in contact since the fifteen-forties. 5 By contrast,

1*52-6. The business became international; for the Japanese pirates enlisted Chinese,
Korean, Annamitc, Malay, and Portuguese recruits. A key role was played by Chinese
collaborationists (Boxer, op. cit.. pp. 254-5).

‘ The last raid by Japanese pirates on China was made in A.D. 1588 (Boxer, op. cit.,
p. 256). Thereafter, unemployed Japanese adventurers offered the Spanish authorities
at Manila Japanese aid for an invasion of China, and the Spaniards did take Japanese
mercenaries with them when they invaded Cambodia in a.d. 1595 (ibid., pp. 259-61).

» While Japanese pirates had been raiding China, other Japanese had been flouting
the Ming Imperial Government’s will in another way by trading with the Chinese.
This trade had been started in the fifteenth century of the Christian Era by Japanese
Zen Buddhist monasteries, and had afterwards been taken up by lay daimyo (Boxer,
op. cit., pp. 249 - 5 ° » n <* * 53 )-.

» A Japanese colony established itself at Manila between a.d. 1593 and a.d. 1614
(Boxer, op. cit., p. 302), and during the first quarter of the seventeenth century of the
Christian Era similar colonies of Japanese traders and mercenaries made their appear¬
ance at divers points in South-West Asia (ibid., pp. 296-7).

* There were Japanese traders in Mexico in a.d. i 597 (Murdoch, J.: History of Japan,
vol. ii (Kobe 190-3, Japan Chronicle), p. 292). Japanese traders were doing business all
over the Pacific by the time when they were suddenly prohibited from engaging in
foreign trade by the non-intercourse ordinance of the 23rd June, 1636 (ibid., p. 691).

J As early as A.D. 1596 the Japanese had been put on their guard against Spanish
imperialism by some unwary remarks from the lips of the pilot-major of a wrecked
Spanish ship, the San Felipe. In explanation of the enormous extent of the Spanish
Crown’s possessions—as displayed on a map of the World which he had shown to his
Japanese interlocutors with an eye to overawing them—the imprudent Spaniard had
declared that Spain’s first move towards getting possession of any non-Wcstcrn country
on which she had political designs was to send missionaries to promote the formation
of a native Christian party there which would serve, when the time came, as a spear¬
head for Spanish aggression (Boxer, op. cit., pp. 165-6) —and this fate might indeed
have overtaken Japan (Murdoch, J.: History of Japan, vol. ii (Kobe 1903, Japan
Chronicle), p. 437) if the political unification of Japan under an indigenous dictator¬
ship in A.D. 1590 had not been confirmed by the results of the Battle of Sekigchsra
on the 21 st October, 1600, and the Battle of Osaka on the 3rd June, 1615; for,
after the personal union of the Portuguese with the Spanish Crown in A.D. 1581, the
Spanish Franciscan friars in the Philippines had taken the offensive against the Portu¬
guese Crown’s ecclesiastical padroado in Asia (Boxer, op. cit., pp. 155-6), and had
entered the Japan mission field in rivalry with the Portuguese Jesuits with Hideyoshi’s

S will (ibid., pp. 160-2), though in a.d. 1583 the Italian provincial of the Portuguese
t mission in Japan, Valignano, had pleaded for the exclusion of other Catholic
itian religious orders from Japan and had had his request granted both by King
Philip and by the Vatican (in a bull of the 21st January, 1585) (ibid., pp. 156-60).

Hideyoshi’s motives in welcoming the Franciscans had been to introduce a counter¬
poise to the influence of the Jesuits and to bring down the price of Chinese goods in
Japan by stimulating a Spanish competition with the Portuguese middlemen in the
trade between Japan and China; but the Japanese dictator had not reckoned with the
Spanish Franciscans’ fanatical temper. To the Jesuits' dismay—though not to their

B 2S98.vm

322 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the vast sub-continent of China had nothing more to fear from the advent
of Western pirates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than she
had found to fear from the activities of Japanese pirates in the four¬
teenth and fifteenth centuries. 1 For China, such still unmechanized
Early Modem Western sea-raiders, however annoying they might be,
were not potential conquerors; the dangers that gave serious cause for
anxiety to a Chinese Imperial Government in this age were the possibili¬
ties of domestic revolt and of overland invasion from the Eurasian
Steppe beyond the Great Wall or from the Manchurian forests beyond
the Willow Palisade; and, after an enfeebled indigenous Ming Dynasty
had been duly supplanted by a vigorous semi-barbarian Manchu
Dynasty in the course of the seventeenth century, a recurrence of the
conjuncture of invasion and revolt which had brought the Manchus
into the saddle did not present itself on the Chinese political horizon
within the next two hundred years. 2

surprise, for Valignano had predicted this in A.D. 1583 (ibid., p. 158)—the Spanish
friars recklessly applied in Japan the drastic methods of propaganda which they had
used with success in missions to primitive peoples (ibid., p. 162). They ministered to the
poor (ibid., p. 233), whom the Jesuits in Japan had neglected (ibid., p. 228), and they
avowedly aimed at nothing less than a mass conversion of the Japanese people to
Christianity (ibid., p. 231). In short, the Spanish friars’ tactlessness opened the new
Japanese central government’s eyes to the reality of the Spanish peril to Japan’s in¬
dependence, and Ieyaau put the Spanish lay residents in Japan and their associates the
Franciscan missionaries under surveillance on the receipt of information that a Spanish
expedition was on its way from Mexico for the conquest of the Moluccas (Murdoch,
op. cit., vol. ii, p. 463). In A.D. 1612 the Spaniards started making a survey of the
Japanese coasts, and Ieyasu’s English mentor Will Adams did not miss his opportunity
of improving the occasion by enlarging on the implications for Japanese security that
were to be seen in this Spanish move (ibid., p. 489). The moral was pointed by the
detection of an intrigue between officials of Icyasu’s administration and Spanish agents
in a.d. 1612-13 (ibid., p. 492).

A domestic Pax Tokugatcica in Japan had indeed been so hardly won that the Bakufu
was naturally on the alert to foresee and parry all possible threats to its preservation.
On the eve of the promulgation of the decree of the 27th January, 1614 (sec p. 323, n.
3, below), the Jesuit Father Carvalho gave it as his opinion that the Bakufu was afraid
of some Christian daimyo’s attempting to wrest the supreme power in Japan out of
Tokugawa hands with Spanish support (Boxer, op. cit., p. 311). The Japanese political
authorities’ chief misgiving about Christianity—and this misgiving was felt by the
daimyo as well as by the Bakufu—was that its claim on the allegiance of its Japanese
converts might be a challenge to the claims of feudal loyalty—though in the event,
when the converts’ steadfastness was put to the test by persecution, the percentage of
-tmurai converts who remained faithful was much lower than the percentage of non-
samurai converts, who had no feudal tics to make competing claims upon them (ibid.,
pp. 338-9 an d 362). Japanese converts to Christianity were not the only potentially
subversive element* in a hardly pacified Japan at which the Bakufu looked askance. It
was also afraid of the lordless (i.e. unemployed) samurai, the so-called ronin ; and this
fear seems to have been the motive for the ban in a.d. 1621 upon foreign enlistment

S ibid., p. 269), and for the ban in a.d. 1633-6 upon overseas trade in Japanese bottoms
ibid., p. 272). _

> The behaviour of the Portuguese was on a par with that of the Japanese pirates in
Chinese estimation (Fitzgerald, C. P.: China, a Short Cultural History (London 1935,
Cresset Press), p. 471). On this account the Portuguese were corraled in a walled-off
settlement at Macao in a.d. 1557 (ibid., p. 474), and the only Chinese port opened to
Western traders was Canton—by contrast with the Chinese treatment of the earlier
Arab, Persian, and Malay commercial travellers from overseas who, unlike the Western
barbarians, had been considered sufficiently civilized to be allowed to circulate through¬
out China without restrictions (ibid., p. 470). It is significant that Matteo Ricci, who
was a missionary and not a trader and who had taken the trouble to make himself an
adept in the Sinic literary culture, was allowed by the Emperor to reside in Peking in
spite of opposition from the Board of Rites (ibid., pp. 475-6).

* In the great war between the Manchu Far Eastern universal state and the steppe
empire of the Zungars in the sixth decade of the eighteenth century of the Christian Era,
the political stake was the fate of Zungaria only, and not the fate of China (sec lll.iii. 19).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 323
This difference in the geographico-political situations of China and
Japan in the Early Modern Age of Western oceanic expansion goes far
towards explaining why it was that in China the repression of Roman
Catholic Christianity was postponed till the turn of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries of the Christian Era and was the outcome, not
of any apprehensive calculations in the field of power politics, but of
an academic controversy over a point of theological terminology 1 —in
contrast to the comparative promptness and ruthlessness of the suppres¬
sion of Roman Catholic Christianity in Japan, and the final cutting of all
but one solitary Dutch thread in the nexus between Japan and the
Western World of the day. The succession of blows delivered by a newly
established Japanese Central Government began with Hideyoshi’s
ordinance of the 25th July, 1587, decreeing the banishment from
Japan of Western Christian missionaries, 2 and culminated in the
ordinances of a.d. 1636 and 1639, 3 forbidding Japanese subjects to

1 See V. v. 365-7 and 539, and V. vi. 13-24.

* Sec Murdoch, J.: History of Japan, vol. ii (Kobe 1903, Japan Chronicle), p. 243;
Boxer, op. cit., pp. 147-8. It is significant that Hideyoshi should have fired this first
shot in his anti-Western campaign as early as a.d. 1587; for, though his subjugation, in
that year, of the principality of Satsuma on the island of Kyushu had brought him within
sight of his goal of imposing a pax oeeumenica on the Japanese World, his establish¬
ment of a Japanese universal state was not actually completed before his conquest of
the Kwantd in a.d. 1590 (see Murdoch, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 222-234 and 258;
Sansom, G. B.: Japan, A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press),

i 1 >ce ilurdoch, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 636 and 664; Boxer, op. cit., pp. 372 and 384.
The first martyrdoms were inflicted on the 5th February, 1507, when, as a retort to the
threat implied in the pilot-major of the San Felipe's indiscreet avowal, twenty-six
Christians (consisting of six Westem-born Franciscans and twenty Japanese converts)
were put to death (Murdoch, op. cit., vol. cit., pp. 280 and 295; Sansom, G. B .-.Japan,
A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press), p. 413; Boxer, op. cit., p. 166).
The extirpation of Christianity in Japan began in a.d. 1612 (Murdoch, op. cit., vol.
cit., p. 487; Sansom, op. cit., pp. 416-17). After Hideyoshi’s successor Tokugawa
Ieyasu had received an unfavourable report on Christianity from an investigator whom
he had commissioned to inauire into it (Murdoch, op. cit., vol. cit., p. 499), an edict
ordering the suppression of Christianity in Japan was issued by him on the 27th January’,
1614 (ibid., p. 503; Boxer, op. cit., pp. 317-19). This decree required all Japanese
subjects to enrol themselves in one or other of the Japanese Mahayanian Buddhist
churches, and the Buddhist priests were made responsible for keeping watch over their
parishioners’ orthodoxy (Boxer, op. cit., pp. 318-19). The prospect of persecution
evoked an outburst of religious fervour in the Christian community at Nagasaki in May,
1614 (ibid., pp. 323-4). Yet, though 47 Western fathers (27 of them Jesuits) and more
than too Japanese Jesuit lay brothers (dojoku) disobeyed the order for their banishment
in the decree of a.d. 1614 by staying on in Japan tub rota (ibid., p. 327), no single
foreigner was put to death in Japan on account of his religion so long as Ieyasu (omit
a.d. 1616) remained alive (ibid., p. 331). In A.D. 1617 one Western Dominican and one
Western Augustinian in Japan courted martyrdom, for the sake of sharing the Japanese
Christian martyrs’ fate (ibid., pp. 332-3). Some Western priest* remained in hiding in
Japan for twenty years (ibid., p. 336). From a.d. 1613 to a.d. 1618 the Japanese author¬
ities turned a blind eye to violations of the ban on Christianity (ibid., pp. 331-2), and,
in particular, Hasegawa Gonroku, who from A.D. 1615 to a.d. 1626 was governor of
Nagasaki, the centre of the Christian community in Japan, did his utmost to avoid having
to make martyrs (ibid., pp. 345-6). When martyrdoms were inflicted, the authorities
did not prevent the Christians mom making mass-demonstrations of their feelings (ibid.,
pp. 342-3)* According to Murdoch (op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 618-23), there was a crescendo
of martyrdoms during the years a.d. 1617-22. The return, probably in a.d. 1622, of an
emissary, Ibi Masayoshi, who had been sent by the Bakufu to inspect the Westerners’
European homeland (ibid., p. 62a), was followed in a.d. 1624-5 by edicts expelling all
Spaniards from Japan and forbidding Japanese subjects to trade with any foreign coun¬
try, particularly with Spain, Mexico, and the Philippines (ibid., p. 626; Boxer, op. cit.,
P- . 439 , n. 1). The systematic enforcement of the decree of a.d. 1614 by methods of
frightfulness’ did not begin till after the accession of Icmitsu to the Shogunate in a.d.
1623 (Boxer, op. cit., p. 362). The years a.d. 1626-36 witnessed the apostasy of the great

324 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
continue to travel abroad and Portuguese subjects to continue to reside
in Japan. 1

Chinese and Japanese Reactions to the Impact of a Late Modern West
In Japan, as in China, the eventual abandonment of a self-imposed
insulation from contact with the West was initiated from below up¬
wards, and was inspired by a hunger to taste the forbidden fruits of
Modern Western scientific knowledge before this disinterested intel¬
lectual quest was conscripted into the service of a political movement for
mastering the practical applications of the knowledge through which
the Westerners had latterly been acquiring an unprecedented economic
and military power. Like the early seventeenth-century Japanese de¬
majority of the Western Catholic missionaries’ Japanese converts (ibid., p. 360), who in
a.d. 1614 had numbered some 300,000 out of a total population of some 20,000,000
(ibid., pp. 230 and 320-1).

The ordinance of the 23rd June, 1636, reaffirmed and made absolute, under pain of
death, ordinances of a.d. 1633-4 forbidding even licensed Japanese ships to continue
to engage in foreign trade without special permits, and debarring Japanese residents
abroad from returning home; and the new decree also forbade Portuguese residents and
their issue to continue to reside in Japan or to return thither (Murdoch, op. cit., vol. ii,
p. 636). The Bakufu set itself to make the veto on foreign trade effective by prescribing
a maximum tonnage for Japanese merchant ships and laying down specifications for their
construction (ibid., p. 693)- 0 ° the 22nd October, 1636, Portuguese residents and their
property were duly deported, and thenceforth Portuguese trade with Japan had to be
conducted under close restrictions (ibid., p. 637). The final step was precipitated by an
insurrection—provoked by the tyranny of a local daimyo—which broke out on the 17th
December. 1637, on the Shimebara Peninsula in Kyushu and which was not suppressed
till the insurgents’ stronghold, Hara Castle, was stormed by the Bakufu’s forces on the
1 ilh April, 1638. Thirty-seven thousand Japanese Christians are said to have re-emerged,

joined the insurgents, and lost their lives in this affair (Sansom, op. cit., p. 431; Boxer,
op. cit., p. 361). The decree of the 5th July, 1639, forbidding all intercourse with the
Portuguese, was promulgated in consequence (Boxer, op. dt., p. 384; Murdoch, op.dt.,
vol. dt., p. 664). Portuguese ships arriving in Japan in a.d. 1639 were refused admittance
(ibid., p. 664). On the 6th July, 1640, a Portuguese expostulatory embassy arrived at
Nagasaki (ibid., p. 663). On the 3rd August, 1640, the four Portuguese ambassadors and
fifty-seven of their companions were put to death, while thirteen survivors were sent back
to Macao to convey to the Portuguese authorities a message from the Japanese Govern¬
ment: 'Let them think no more of us, as if we were no longer in the World’(ibid., p. 667).

It did not prove so easy to extirpate the remnant of the native Catholic Christian com¬
munity in Japan. One effect of the persecution was to disperse the community from
North-Western Kyushu, where it had originally been concentrated (Boxer, op. cit., p.
322), to north-eastern districts of the Main Island to which the Western missionaries
had never penetrated (ibid., pp. 335 and 358). The last martyrdoms were inflicted in
a.d. 1856, and the last punishments, short of death, in a.d. 1867. Even after the Western¬
izing revolution of a.d. t868, the new regime posted notices declaring: 'The evil sect of
Christians is forbidden as heretofore’. The ordinance of A.D. 1614 was never formally
rescinded, but after A.D. 1873 the notices were withdrawn, and the Japanese Christians
then in prison on account of their religion were released and indemnified, because the
new regime had come to realize that this was a condition line qua non for obtaining the
Western Powers’ consent to a modification of the capitulatory treaties (Sansom, G. B.:
The Wettem World and Japan (London 1950. Cresset Press), pp. 408-10). By this time
the remnant of a Japanese Catholic Christendom had been holding out under severe
persecution for longer than a quarter of a millennium.

1 For the expulsion from Japan of all Westerners except the Dutch between a.d. 1614
and a.d. 1638, see II. ii. 366, n. 2. For the humiliations inflicted on the Dutch ghetto-
dwellers on the islet of Deshima from a.d. 1641 to a.d. 1838, see II. ii. 232-3. The
methods of ‘frightfulness’ by which the Japanese eliminated the Western residents and
the Japanese converts to Western Christianity in their midst, and deterred the West,
for more than two centuries to come, from making any further attempts to break down
Japan’s self-imposed isolation, had their counterpart in the contemporary conduct of
Westerners in at least one recently Western-occupied adjacent Far Eastern country. In
a.d. 1602, and again in A.D. 1639, the Spaniards provided for the security of their
dominion over Manila by massacring the Chinese residents there (Soothill, W. E.:
China and the West (Oxford, 1925, University Press), p. 84).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 325
votccs to a Roman Catholic Western Christianity, the early nineteenth-
century Japanese devotees to a Modern Western secular science
demonstrated their sincerity by exposing themselves to the risk of
meeting the tragic ends that eventually overtook them, at a moment of
darkness before dawn, in the proscriptions of a.d. 1840 and a.d. 1850.'

The Tokugawa regime signalized the last years of its existence by
banning all Dutch studies outside the field of medicine; 2 and, from the
Bakufu's standpoint, the only thing wrong about this repressive policy
was its impracticability. Yet this welling up of a disinterested intel¬
lectual curiosity concerning the achievements of a Modern Western
science was an indirect outcome of the Bakufu’s own cultural policy. In
their anxiety to conserve their arduously attained achievement of freez¬
ing Japanese life into immobility on the once feverishly agitated military
and political planes, the Tokugawa had wisely looked for alternative
vents for unabated Japanese energies, and they had encouraged the
pursuit of learning as one innocuous outlet. The mental discipline that
they had favoured had been the cultivation of a Ncoconfucianism
which was the legacy of the intellectual renaissance of the Sung Age in
China; 3 but it proved impossible for a reactionary rdgime in Japan at the

» See Murdoch, J.: History ojJapan, vol. iii (London 1926, Kegan Paul), p. 563.
During the hundred years preceding the crisis of a.d. i 853-68. both private and official
circles in Japan were torn in two between feelings of curiosity and feelings of xenophobia
as a [result of their gradually increasing awareness of a renewal of pressure on Japan
from the Western World (including Russia under her Petrine regime); and the conflict
between these incompatible Japanese psychological reactions expressed itself in an
inconsequent jumble of 'Zealot' and 'Herodian' gestures.

The . fapancse physicians who had mastered the secrets of Dutch medical science
incurred the jealousy of their Chinese-trained colleagues (ibid., p. 559 ). whose feelings
towards them were much like those of the Egyptian physicians at the court of the
Achacmenian Emperor Darius I when they were put out of countenance by the super¬
iority of their interloping Hellenic confrere D«moc«d£» (Herodotus, Book III, chaps.

S i). In a.d. 1784 a Japanese named Tanuma was assassinated on account of his
vity to intercourse with Westerners (Murdoch, op. cat., vol. iii, p. 505); and, per-
n reaction to a scries of descents on the Japanese coasts by Russian and British
ships in the course of the years A.D. 1804-1 1 (ibid., pp. 511-22), a number of precaution¬
ary measures were taken by the Bakufu. During the years a.d. 1809-17 the Dutch ghetto
on Dcshima was marooned (ibid., p. 523). In A.D. 1S24 the standing orders for the ex¬
pulsion of foreigners landing in Japan were renewed (ibid., p. 528). In a.d. 1829 von
Siebold (see p. 326, n. 1, below) was banished from Japan on a charge of having ob¬
tained possession of Japanese maps and other documents (ibid., p. 558). An embassy
from the Dutch Crown was rebuffed in a.d. 1844 (ibid., p. 530).

On the other hand in A.D. 1786 the Bakufu began to explore the island of Yezo
(Hokkaido) with a view to forestalling an apprehended Russian encroachment there
(ibid., p. 513). In a.d. 1809 they ordered the Japanese interpreters in Nagasaki to add
to their repertory of foreign languages, hitherto confined to Dutch, by learning English
and Russian (ibid., p. 548). Between a.d. 1809 and a.d. 18:7 the Dutch agent on
Deshima compiled a Dutch-Japancsc lexicon at the Bakufu’s request (ibid., p. 550).
The apprehensions aroused in Japan by the spectacle of China's helplessness in the
Sino-British war of A.D. 1839-42 moved the Bakufu to tolerate the activities of Taka-
shima and his disciple Sakuma, who devoted their lives to mastering the contemporary
Western technology of gunnery with an eye to the defence of Japan's coasts against
Western naval attack. Yet the ‘Zealots) managed to have Takashima imprisoned and pre¬
vented from continuing his work until after Commodore Perry’s first visitation in A.D.
1853 (Sansom, G. B.: The Western World and Japan (London 1950, Cresset Press),
pp. 262-72). During the years a.d. 1851-8 the Bakufu winked at commercial intercourse
between the Japanese fief of Satsuma and France via the Luchu Islands, which were a

dependency of Satsuma dejaeto (Murdoch, op. cit., vol. iii, p. 534).
1 See Murdoch, op. cit., vol. cit., pp. 564-5.

1 See Murdoch, op. cit., vol. cit., pp. 97-100; Sansom, G.'.Japa
History (London 1932, Cresset Press), pp. 47 ® »nd 492-3 ; eundem:
and Japan (London 1950, Cresset Press), pp. 195-8 and 218-20.

3 z 6 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to permit its subjects to
supplement their authorized cultivation of a conservative vein of indi¬
genous thought by making a strictly utilitarian study of Modern Western
medicine without thereby opening a passage for the mighty flood of
Modern Western knowledge in its entirety, 1 as it was to prove impossible
for the Ottoman autocrat ‘Abd-al-Hamld II at the turn of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries to allow his military cadets to make a strictly
utilitarian study of the Modern Western art of war without exposing the
old order to the risk of being swept away by an influx of the political
Ideas of 1789. 1

While the inspiration of the nineteenth-century Japanese Westerniza¬
tion movement from below upwards thus came from Modern Western
secular scientific thought, the inspiration of the corresponding and
contemporary movement in China came from Modern Western Pro¬
testant Christianity, whose missionaries accompanied the British and
American salesmen of the wares of an industrialized West, 1 as in the
sixteenth century the missionaries of a Tridcntinc Roman Catholic
Christianity had accompanied the Portuguese pioneers of Early Modern

1 An embargo on the translation of Western books into Japanese had been lifted in
A.D. 1720 (Sansom, The Western World and Japan, p. 214; Murdoch, J.: History of
Japan, vol. iii (London 1926, Kegan Paul), p. 498); and, in this matter of cultural policy,
some latitude was allowed by the Bakufu to its feudatories. While a reactionary Shin¬
toism was being inculcated in Mito, Dutch learning was being cultivated in Sakura

V In the' ficf of { ' onezawa, Western medicine was introduced by the Daimyo Uycsugi
half a century before the advent of Commodore Perry (ibid., p. jyi). In a.d. 1771 bugitu
Gcmpaku, a Japanese physician in a daimyo’s service, was excited by coming across
some Dutch works on anatomy (ibid., p. 543). Sugita and two other Japanese physicians
thereupon agreed with one another to learn Dutch; and they puzzled out the meaning
of a Dutch anatomy book by using the diagrams as clues (ibid., p. 544; Sansom, op. cit.,
p. 217) with the patience and ingenuity which nineteenth-century Western scholars were
to employ, two or three generations later, in deciphering cuneiform. Thereafter, several

6 'anese doctors obtained instruction, circa a.d. 1773. from a Swedish resident on
shima named Thunberg (Murdoch, op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 340 and 343) and then from
Isaac Titsingh, who was in charge of the Dutch factory on Dcshima at divers times
ranging from a.d. 1779 to a.d. 1785 (Sansom, op. cit., p. 2:8). A German scientist,
P. J. von Siebold, who was in Japan during the years a.d. 1823-9, was visited at Naga¬
saki by students from all over the country who, after returning to their homes, used to
submit to their Western instructor medical dissertations written in Japanese (ibid., pp.
262 and 274; Murdoch, op. cit., vol. iii, p. 55 *)-
Meanwhile, Japanese curiosity concerning Western thought had not remained con¬
fined to the field of medical studies. An interest in mathematics, astronomy, and carto¬
graphy, which had begun to show itself in Japan as early as a.d. 1684, had led to a study
there of learned works by Jesuit fathers in Chinese (ibid., pp. 553-4); and this wider
range of interest was stimulated by Titsingh, who studied Japanese literature, established
personal relations with members of the Japanese governing class, and kept up a corre¬
spondence with them (ibid., pp. 502-4 and 507)—an intimacy which would hardly have
been possible in the years A.D. 1690-2, when the German traveller Engclbrecht Kacmp-
fer found that it was the policy of the Bakufu to prevent the Dutch from learning
Japanese, though they failed to prevent Knempfer from transmitting an intellectual
current in the opposite direction by giving his Japanese attendant instruction in the
Dutch language and in contemporary Western medicine (ibid., pp. 539 and 542). At
Yedo, ‘down-town’ and ‘up-town’ clubs for the study of Western learning had sprung
up during the first half of the nineteenth century, and by a.d. 1850 fifty-two Dutch
works had been translated into Japanese by Takano Nagohide, alias Choei (ibid., pp.
339-60). Both Takano and his friend and confederate Watanabe Noboru, alias Kwazan,
were eventually harried by persecution into committing suicide (Sansom, op. cit., pp.
273-80).

* See pp. 234-6, above.

* Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to work in China, landed at Canton in
a.d. 1802 (Soothill, W. E.: China and ike West (Oxford 1925, University Press), p. 98).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 327
Western commercial enterprise in the Far East. In another context' we
have noticed that the T’aip’ing politico-religious insurrectionary move¬
ment, which came near to overthrowing the Manchu regime in the sixth
and seventh decades of the nineteenth century , 2 was not merely a
‘Zealot’ indigenous revolt against the tincture of an exotic Far Western
Christian culture in the tradition of a semi-barbarian Manchu ‘ascen¬
dancy’, but was also, in another aspect, a translation of Protestant
Western Christianity into indigenous Far Eastern terms . 3 Thereafter,
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Chinese initiators of
a movement for secular political reform were likewise influenced by
Protestant Western missionaries ; 4 Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the
Kuomintang, was the son of a Protestant Christian father ; 5 and another
Protestant Christian Chinese family played a paramount part in the
Kuomintang’s subsequent history in the persons of Madame Sun Yat-
sen, her sister Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and their brother T. V. Soong.

Thus, from the outset, the nineteenth-century Chinese Westernizing
movement differed from its Japanese counterpart in having a Protestant
Christian instead of a secular scientific Western inspiration; and the two
movements also rapidly diverged on the political plane. Both movements
were confronted with the formidable task of having to liquidate and
replace a well-established indigenous oecumenical regime which had
demonstrated its unfitness to survive by showing itself insensitive to
the imperative need for coping with the impact of an irresistibly power¬
ful secularized Modern Western Civilization; but in this political
emergency the Japanese Westernizers were more alert, more prompt,
and more efficient than the Chinese. Within fifteen years of the first
appearance of Commodore Perry’s squadron in Japanese territorial
waters in a.d. 1853, the Japanese Westernizers had not only overthrown
a Tokugawa regime that had failed to rise to the urgent occasion; they

« See V. V. 107, XIX, and 1:7.

* At their flood tide the T aip’ing managed to push an advance-guard of seven
thousand men to within twenty miles of Tientsin (Fitzgerald, C. P.: China, A Short
Cultural History (London 1935, Cresset Press), p. 569).

J The T’ai P’ing movement... was primarily a religious revival and only secondarily
a revolt against the Manchus’ (Fitzgerald, C. P.: China, A Short Cultural History
(London 1915, Cresset Press), p. 566). The T’aip’ing were friendly to the West, and it
was their policy to throw the whole of China open to the Westerners instead of keeping
them confined to the Treaty Ports (ibid., pp. <>70-1); yet the French and British had
no sooner imposed their own terms on the Manchu Imperial Government at Peking
in the wars of a.d. 1857-60 than they perversely supplied the conservative Manchus
with the military means of suppressing a spontaneous Chinese Westernizing movement
which the Imperial Government had proved unable to crush out of its own resources
(ibid., pp. 571-2). It will be seen that this decisive Franco-British intervention in China
in favour of the Imperial Government and against the T’aip’ing in the seventh decade
of the nineteenth century was in this respect analogous to the similarly decisive inter¬
vention of Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, and the Hapsburg Monarchy in the Ottoman
Empire in favour of Sultan MahmOd II and against Mehmed ‘Ali in A.D. 1839-41. The
frustration of the T’aip’ing movement was a tragic episode in the history of the encounter
between China and the Modem West; for the author of the movement, the Hakka Hung
Hsiu-ch’uan, was making a second attempt at the enterprise—previously attempted by
the Jesuits without ultimate success—of initiating China into the Modern Western cul¬
ture in its Christian entirety and not just in a technological abstract. In itself, Hung’s
attempt was the more promising of the two, since it emanated, not from alien mission¬
aries, but from a Chinese prophet, and proceeded, not from above downwards, but from
below upwards.

* For the influence of the missionaries Allen and Richard in that generation, see

Soothill, op. dt., p. 173. * See Soothill, op. cic., p. 175.

328 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
had achieved the far more difficult feat of installing in its place a new
regime capable of putting into operation a comprehensive Westernizing
movement from above downwards. The Chinese took 118 years to
accomplish even the negative political result that the Japanese achieved
in fifteen. The arrival of Lord Macartney’s Embassy at Peking in a.d.
1793 was no less illuminating a demonstration of the formidably en¬
hanced potency of the Western Civilization than the arrival of Com¬
modore Perry’s squadron in Ycdo Bay sixty years later; yet in China
the overthrow of the ancien regime did not follow till A.D. 1911, and the
discarded universal state was then replaced, not by any effective new
Westernizing political order, but by a familiar anarchy which the
Kuomintang lamentably failed to overcome during the quarter of a
century (a.d. 1923-48) which this twentieth-century' Chinese Westerniz¬
ing movement had at its disposal for showing whether it was capable of
living up to its professed ideals and carrying out its declared programme. 1

Since the nineteenth-century shock that jolted both Far Eastern
peoples out of their ruts was the impact of new high-powered Western
armaments carried by British warships in the war of a.d. 1S39-42 and
by American warships in the visitations of a.d. 1853-4, a nineteenth-
century Japan’s flying start over a nineteenth-century China in a race
towards the goal of political and economic Westernization can be
measured by the degree of Japan’s military superiority over China during
the fifty years running from the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war of
a.d. 1894-5. During that half-century China was militarily at Japan’s
mercy; and, though, in the last round of this struggle, an effective con¬
quest of the whole of China proved to be beyond Japan’s resources, it
was equally evident that, if the Japanese war-machine had not been
shattered in the Second World War by the United States, the Chinese

1 A comparison, which is as illuminating as it is objective, between the Chinese and
the Japanese response to the identical challenge presented to both branches of the Far
Eastern Society by the impact of a Late Modem Western Civilization is made by Hu
Shih in The Chinese Renaissance: The Haskell Lectures . 1933 (Chicago 1934, University
Press), chap. 1. The Chinese philosopher's conclusion is that 'there are various types
of cultural response, of which the Japanese type may be called one of "centralized con¬
trol", and the Chinese type one of “diffused penetration and permeation'” (ibid., p. 27).
In seeking to account for Japan's relative success, by comparison with the relative failure
of China’s corresponding contemporary efforts, in responding to the challenge from the
West in the first chapter of an episode that was common to the history of both countries,
Hu Shih puts his finger (ibid., p. 5) on three assets that Japan possessed, and China
lacked, at the time. The first of these was an old, experienced, ana powerful aristocratic
ruling class; the second was a military tradition, kept alive in that class, which gave
Japan the spirit to hold her own in the arena of a militaristic Western World (in contrast
to the prevailing tradition in China, where the military virtues had remained under a
cloud ever since they had been discredited by the paroxysm of militarism by which an
antecedent Sinic Civilization had been convulsed during a Time of Troubles ending in
the establishment of a Sinic universal state by Ts’in She Hwang-ti). The third Japanese
asset to which Hu Shih draws attention is the fact that, by the time of the cultural
revolution in Japan in and after the seventh decade of the nineteenth century of the
Christian Era, the Imperial Dynasty had already been reigning without governing for
at least a thousand years, and had thereby automatically acquired a cumulative aura
of venerability which was not tarnished by any of the odium that is inevitably incurred
by political authorities who wield effective power. Hence, when, in a.d. 1868, the Japan¬
ese Imperial House was brought out of cold storage, it was admirably 'suited to be made
into a constitutional monarchy after the European pattern' (ibid., p. 19). Hu Shih gives
interesting illustrations of the disadvantage at which China found herself in this age, by
comparison with Japan, for want of these three political instruments for dealing with
the impact of the West (ibid., pp. 5-23).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 329
would never have been able, unaided, to wrest back out of the Japanese
invaders’ hands the captured ports, industrial areas, and railroads that
were the keys to the Westernization of China and that were vital to
China’s economy in the ratio of their rarity in China at this date.

Moreover, Japan’s facile, albeit inconclusive, victories over China
were the cheapest of the trophies with which a latter-day Japanese
militarism adorned a triumphal progress that carried it, within a span of
fifty years, to its ironical goal of an utter military and political disaster
without precedent in Japanese history. Between a.d. 1894 and a.d. 1945
Japan extracted military dividends from a process of technological
Westernization with a virtuosity that eclipsed the achievements of
Petrine Russia between her victory in the Great Northern War of a.d.
1 70 1-21 and her defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of a.d. 1904-5. In
this trial of strength at the opening of the twentieth century of the
Christian Era between one non-W r cstern people that, by that date, had
been in process of Westernization for more than two hundred years and
another non-W r estern people that had been treading the same road for
less than half a century, a victorious Japan won recognition as a Great
Power in the Western comity of states, as a victorious Russia had won
the same recognition, some two hundred years earlier, in her trial of
strength with the Sweden of King Charles XII. Thereafter, Japan
achieved the tour de force of making herself one of the three leading naval
Powers in a twentieth-century world in which naval strength was a func¬
tion of industrial potency in terms of a W’estern industrial technique;
and her final fling was to smite the United States Navy in Pearl Harbour
and overrun all the colonial possessions of the Western Powers in South-
East Asia, from the Philippines to Malaya and Sumatra inclusive, in the
course of a suicidal leap into the jaws of disaster.

These jaws were the common destination at which a Japanese hare
and a Chinese tortoise had arrived simultaneously by the beginning of
the second half of the twentieth century. At that date Japan was still
lying passive under a foreign military occupation to which she had sub¬
mitted by an act of unconditional surrender, while China, after she had
robbed herself of the benefits of her liberation from the scourge of
Japanese militarism by subjecting her tormented body social to the
self-inflicted flagellation of a fresh civil war, had promptly proceeded to
rob herself of the benefits of domestic pacification under the iron hand
of a victorious Communist regime 1 by embroiling herself in a new
foreign war in which she was not the victim but the aggressor, and in
which she was fighting, not Japan, but those Western Powers that had
so recently extricated her from Japan’s clutches. Japan’s plight was with¬
out precedent in the annals of an archipelago which had never before
been invaded with success since the arrival of the Japanese people’s own
ancestors from overseas before the dawn of recorded Japanese history.
China’s plight might look at first sight more familiar, considering how
many times in the course of her long history a bout of anarchy had ended

1 The Chinese Communists won their decisive military victories over the Kuomin-
tang in the autumn and early winter of a.d. 1948. The Communist People’s Republic
of China was inaugurated on the 30th September, 1949.

B 2608 .VIU M 2

330 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
at last in a dictatorial reimposition of domestic peace through the triumph
of a revolutionary regime. Even the alien origin of her new Communist
rulers’ ideology had its precedents in the tincture of Protestant Western
Christianity in the T’aip’ing and the coating of post-Christian Western
Liberalism on the Kuomintang. Yet China’s plight likewise was novel at
least in the points that, in embarking on a foreign war in Korea against
the Western Community of Nations after having fought a culminating
Chinese civil war in which the belligerents had been the Communists
and the Kuomintang, China had become successively a battlefield and
a belligerent in a world-wide conflict between two contending ideologies
which were both of non-Chinese provenance.

The Unsolved Problem of a Rising Pressure of Population

What was the explanation of this uniformly disastrous ending of the
first phase of the second encounter between these two Far Eastern
societies and the Modern West? In both China and Japan the disaster
had its root in a common Asiatic and East European unsolved problem
which has come to our attention already in our survey of the encounter
between the Modern West and the Hindu World. 1 2 What was to be the
effect of the Western Civilization’s impact on economically still primitive
peasant populations which had been accustomed for ages to breed up to
the limits of bare subsistence at a level only just above the starvation line,
and which were now being inoculated with a novel discontent through
a dawning awareness of the possibilities opened up by the progxcss of

Western technology for an improvement in the conditions of human life
—but this without having yet begun to face the hard fact that these possi¬
bilities could become practical opportunities for them only at the price
of an economic, a social, and, above all, a psychological revolution ? In
order to tap the bounty of Amalthea’s horn, these hide-bound peasants
would have to revolutionize their traditional methods of land-utilization
and systems of land-tenure and to regulate the number of their births.
Here were conflicting ideals whose conflict was bound to breed disasters
so long as it remained unresolved; and a disaster which, mid-way
through the twentieth century, wasstill in theoffing for India, had by then
already overtaken the two contemporary societies in the Far East.

The operation of this factor in the history of Japan since the Meiji
Revolution of a.d. 1868 was particularly conspicuous. The complete
military and political stabilization and partial economic stabilization of
Japanese life under the Tokugawa dispensation had been possible
because there was a basis of demographic stability underpinning them.
During the Tokugawa period the population of Japan had been kept
stationary artificially by divers means. 1 When the Tokugawa regime was
liquidated, an unnaturally frozen Japanese body social thawed out;

1 See pp. 213-16, above, and pp. 684-9, below.

2 From circa a.d. 1725 to circa a.D. 1850 the figure was always something between
twenty-eight and thirty millions according to Sansom, G. B.: Japan, A Short Cultural
History (London 1932, Cresset Press), p. 458. By the middle of the eighteenth century,
infanticide and abortion had become regular practices among the Japanese peasantry,
and they do not appear to have been eradicated by being officially prohibited, as they
were in a.d. 1767 (ibid., p. 508).

THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 331
there was a general release of pent-up social forces, in the field of family
life as well as in the fields of economics, politics, and war; and the silent
lapse of the previous restrictions on the increase of population proved
in the event to be a more revolutionary change than the political and
economic revolutions which caught the World’s attention at the time.

Unlike the contemporary changes on the political and economic
planes, the resumption in Japan of unrestricted breeding was not an
effect of any Western influence but was a reversion to the traditional
mores of a primitive peasant society which had been put under restraint,
by a psychological tour de force, in the glacial atmosphere of the Toku-
gawa Age. The contemporary technological Westernization of Japan did,
however, accentuate the practical effect of this relapse into a primitive
habit by lowering a death-rate whose height, in societies not equipped
with Modern Western preventive medicine and public hygiene, had
normally moderated the effects of a high birth-rate on the movement of
population. The consequent net increase of the population in Japan
after the Meiji Revolution was comparable to its net increase in India
after the establishment there of the British Raj; and in Japan the result¬
ing pressure of population on the means of subsistence made itself felt
still more quickly and more acutely owing to the complete absence there
of any reserves of cultivable land, the dearth of raw materials for industry
(a dearth which was specially stringent in respect of coal and iron-ore),
and the people’s traditionally higher average standard of living and
consequently higher expectations in an era of Westernization . 1

A Westernizing Japan might not have been so hard beset by these
economic embarrassments if she had not drawn back at the last moment
from taking the plunge at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries of the Christian Era. If Japan had made her entry into the
comity of Western nations at that date, she would doubtless have
acquired a substantial share of the then still virgin lands in the South
Seas and along the western coasts of the Americas that were subsequently
occupied by settlers from Spain and from the British Isles during the
lost two centuries and a quarter of Japan’s self-imposed insulation. The
once untenanted terrestrial paradises that had meanwhile become
California and New South Wales would have been ideal colonizing
grounds for a Japanese people that was so ‘allergic’ to alien climates that
it found Hokkaido forbiddingly arctic and Formosa forbiddingly
tropical. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when the ocean-
faring Western peoples had had nearly four hundred years’ grace for
exploring and occupying the face of the planet without serious competi¬
tion from any other society, these options were no longer open to a
tardily awakened Japanese Sleeping Beauty. For a Japan who, in
abandoning the Toitugawan limitation of births, had condemned herself
to a choice between expanding in some form or exploding, the only two
alternative forms of expansion that were practical politics in the Meiji
Era were either to persuade the rest of the World to trade with her or to
conquer additional territory, resources, and markets by force of arms

1 For the increase of the economic pressure on the life of the Japanese peasantry after
a.d. 1868, see Sansom, op. cit., pp. 506 segq.

332 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
from existing owners who were militarily too weak to defend their
property against a militarily Westernized Japan’s aggression.

Between a.d. 1S68 and a.d. 1931 Japanese foreign policy oscillated
uneasily between these two cardinal points of her political compass. The
Japanese Liberals counted on the maintenance and expansion of a
market for the relatively cheap products of efficiently managed Japanese
textile and other light industries among vast peasant populations in
Asia and Africa who were acquiring an appetite for the facilities and
amenities of the Modern Western way of life but who could not afford
the price of West European and North American manufactures. The
Japanese militarists pointed to the remorselessly accelerating rise of a
ubiquitous tide of Economic Nationalism, 1 and pressed upon their
countrymen the alternative policy of military conquest with the argu¬
ments that the only markets that Japan could be sure of retaining in an
ever more nationalist-minded world were markets under her own politi¬
cal control, and that even controlled markets would not solve Japan’s
economic problem unless they were supplemented by controlled sources
of food-supply and raw materials. The gradual effect of a world-wide
accentuation of Nationalism in converting the Japanese people to the
Japanese militarists’ doctrine was clinched by the terrible experience of
the devastating economic blizzard which descended on Wall Street in
the autumn of a.d. 1929 and then swept on over the rest of the World.

When the Japanese militarists launched their campaign of aggression
at Mukden on the night of the i8th-i9th September, 1931, they were
condemning Mankind to the torment of a Second World War within
eight years of this date, and condemning their own country, in particular,
to the additional disaster of seeing that torment culminate within four¬
teen years in the national calamity of an utter military defeat. In the
Second World War Japan was not only justly defeated in her desperate
attempt to solve her latter-day economic problem by an unbridled
career of military conquest; she was also justly deprived of all the con¬
quests at the expense of weaker peoples that she had made through an
unscrupulous militarism since a.d. 1894. Yet this just and auspicious
frustration of Japan’s unprincipled policy of trying to solve her economic
problem by means of military aggression was a negative achievement
which had prevented the consummation of a crime without alleviating the
pressure that had moved the criminal to commit his wicked acts; and, at
a date some six or seven years after ‘V-J. Day’, a positive solution of
Japan’s economic problem seemed to be as far off as ever—though a
Japanese student of history might perhaps find some hope and consola¬
tion in the strange new fact that, as an ironical consequence of the
United States’ crushing victory, the responsibility for solving this in¬
sistent Japanese problem by some means or other had been transferred
from Japanese to American shoulders.

In Chinese history the latest illustration of a primitive peasantry’s

1 The turn of the tide during the decade a.d. i 861-71—the very time when Japan waa
making her belated entry into a Westernizing World—has been noticed in IV. iv. 174.
The chief threat to Japan’s exports came, not from the Western industrial countries,
but from the progressive industrialization of non-Westcm countries that, like India,
were beginning to follow Japan’s example.

THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 333
habitual tendency to breed up to the limits of subsistence had been
manifested during the floruit of the Manchu regime from the closing
decades of the seventeenth century to the opening decades of the nine¬
teenth. In the subsequent period of attempted Westernization the
Chinese had never approached a level of military efficiency on Western
lines at which they would have had it in their power to emulate Japan’s
abortive attempt to carve out an empire for herself with the sword at the
expense of her neighbours. The worst that, down to a.d. 1950, the
Chinese had been able to achieve through an imperfect mastery of
Western military apparatus had been to employ it for enhancing the
lethal effect of civil war, which in China was the traditional remedy for
an excessive increase in population; and, although the Chinese Com¬
munist armies that had been launched in a.d. 1950 against the Americans
and their allies in a Korean arena had fought with an efficiency and a
resoluteness which the West had never encountered before in Chinese
troops, they had failed, notwithstanding their superiority in numbers
and their supplies of Russian equipment, to drive their Western
opponents out of South Korea. In a.d. 1952 it did not look as if China,
even under a Communist regime, had much prospect of being more
successful than Japan had been if she were to set out, as Japan had done,
to conquer a I^bensraum for herself by force of arms. It was all the more
fortunate for China that she had inherited from her latest semi-barbarian
conquerors, the Manchus, the last substantial unoccupied reserve of
land in the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere.

Since the removal in a.d. 1878 1 of the last restrictions on Chinese
immigration into the great open spaces of Manchuria beyond the
Willow Palisade, with their vast resources in arable land, minerals, and
timber, the Chinese population of 'the Three Eastern Provinces’ had
risen to the figure of approximately forty million within three genera¬
tions; and this mass migration—which had changed the demographic
map of the World as markedly as the Russian colonization of the Black
Sea Steppes and Siberia or the West European colonization of the
Americas and the South Seas—had been stimulated by the scourges of
civil war, pestilence, and famine in the densely populated adjoining
intramural Chinese provinces of Chihli, Shantung, and Hopei. In the
alternating current of Chinese history, adversity had indeed been as
potent a force as prosperity for promoting the constant expansion of the

1 The establishment of the Manchu Empire in the se%’cntccnth century of the Christ¬
ian Era had brought the thinly populated steppes and forest-clad highlands of Man¬
churia under the same sovereignty as the densely Chinese-inhabited agricultural regions
in the small area outside the Great Wall but inside the Willow Palisade and in the vast
area inside the Great Wall, and under this dispensation there had been an unrestricted
flow of Chinese immigration into the Manchurian country beyond the Willow Palisade.
This immigration had been prohibited in a.d. 1776 by a decree of the Emperor Ch’icn
Lunc with an eye to conserving the Manchurian reservoir of barbarian man-power
which was the source of the Manchus’ military and political ascendancy in the Far
Eastern World. This prohibition had proved ineffective, and, early in the reign of Tno
Kuang (imperabat a.d. 1821-51), the Manchu Imperial Government had reversed Ch’ien
Lung's policy- in Southern Manchuria by legalizing the sale of land in that area to
Chinese purchasers. Heilungkiang, the northernmost and most extensive of the Man¬
churian provinces of the Manchu Empire, was officially opened to Chinese immigration
in a.d. 1878, and Kirin a few years earlier (Young, C. W.: Chinese Colonisation and the
Development of Manchuria (Honolulu 1929, Institute of Pacific Relations), pp. 8-10).

334 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Chinese people over an ever widening area; and this Chinese expansion,
unlike its puny Japanese counterpart, was not restricted by any climatic
limitations. While the Northern Chinese peasants had been schooled by
the hard winters of their native provinces to lead a farmer’s life on the
land in the rigorous climate of Manchuria, the Southern Chinese had
been acclimatized by a fifteen-hundrcd-ycars-long sojourn in the sultry
Yangtse Basin and on the sub-tropical shores of the China Sea for leading
a business man’s life in the cities of Indo-China, Siam, Burma, Indonesia,
and Malaya, where in the twentieth century of the Christian Era at least
one new South-East Asian Chinese province could be seen taking shape
through a traditional process of peaceful penetration.

Yet, in spite of their opportunity and capacity for relieving the pres¬
sure of population in China by both the constructive expedient of urban
and rural colonization in diverse physical climates, ranging from the
tropical to the arctic, and the destructive expedient of chronic civil war,
the Chinese mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian
Era were being defeated almost as signally as the Japanese by the prob¬
lem of coping with the fertility of a primitive peasantry’ in the social
and psychological climate of a Westernizing World; and in China, un¬
like either Japan or India at this date, a problem which had so far found
no solution on the lines of a Western-inspired Democracy was being
forcibly taken in hand by a Russian-inspired Communism. In a.d. 1948-9
a Kuomintang movement which had been discredited by the rapidity
of its change of front from a revolutionary championship of reform to a
reactionary defence of vested interests had been swept away by a Com¬
munism propagated by native Chinese Communist force of arms; and
three years later, at the moment when this volume was being sent to the
press, the Communist regime in China appeared to be securely in the
saddle.

A Communist Russia's Chinese Fifth Column

It remained to be seen whether a Chinese peasantry whose disillusion¬
ment with the Kuomintang had been a decisive though imponderable
factor in turning the scales would find an effective remedy for its ills in
the Communist prescription or would relish the prescribed regimen
even if it were to prove capable of producing its promised effect; but it
was already clear that the military and ideological conquest of China by
Communism in a.d. 1949 was the latest move in a Russian assault on the
main body of the Far Eastern Society which by that date had been in
progress for some three hundred years—though this was the first opera¬
tion in which the Russian strategists had commanded the services of
a Chinese ‘fifth column’.

In the second quarter of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era,
when the Japanese were breaking off their tentative relations with an
Early Modern Western Christendom and when Manchu empire-builders
who had already passed the Willow' Palisade were preparing to make
their passage through the Great Wall, the Manchus were taken in the
rear by Cossack pioneers of an expanding Russian Orthodox Christen¬
dom who had burst into the Upper Basin of the Amur River after

THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 335
successively outflanking DSr-al-Islam and the Eurasian Steppe. As soon
as the Manchus had broken at least the overt resistance of Southern
China, where their usurpation had been stubbornly contested, they
turned upon these audacious Cossack trespassers on the Manchurian
pasture-lands that were the reservoir of Manchu barbarian man-power,
and drove the intruders back to a line which the Imperial Russian
Government found itself compelled to accept de jure as the frontier
between the two Powers and to respect de facto for a hundred and sixty-
eight years following the conclusion, at Nerchinsk, of the Russo-Manchu
peace treaty of a.d. 1689.

This treaty provided for the maintenance of an authorized channel for
overland trade between the two empires, and of a Russian embassy and
church at Peking; but, throughout the next two centuries, the impact
of Russia on China overland was felt only faintly by comparison with the
maritime impact of the Portuguese and their more aggressive British and
French successors. The concessions exacted from China by the maritime
Western Powers as the victors’ spoils in the wars of a.d. 1839-42 and
a.d. 1857-60 cut Chinese sensibilities to the quick; but, when, in a.d.
1857, Russia righted the balance of competitive aggression at China’s
expense by compelling the Manchu Imperial Government to cede to
Russia their title to all the territory that the peace settlement of a.d.
1689 had assigned to the Manchu Empire on the left bank of the Amur
and the right bank of the Ussuri, neither the Chinese people nor even
their Manchu masters were sensibly affected by the loss of these then
still empty border territories; and they seem hardly to have noticed the
construction of the new Russian port of Vladivostok in an all but ice-
free natural harbour at the south-western extremity of these ceded
Manchu territories, within a stone’s throw of the north-cast corner of
Korea. The Chinese did not become apprehensively aware of Russia’s
advancing shadow till a.d. 1897, when the Russian Navy occupied Port
Arthur as Russia’s prize in a scramble between the Powers of the Western
World for the seizure of naval bases on China’s coasts, and a.d. 1900,
when, taking advantage of the imbroglio with the maritime Western
Powers in which China had been involved by a ‘Zealot’ movement
culminating in the xenophobe Boxer Rebellion, the Russian Army
swooped upon Manchuria and planted itself—in the footprints of the
Manchus on the eve of the Manchu conquest of Intramural China
250 years back—at the threshold of Shanhaikwan, the vital passage
between the mountains and the sea which was Intramural China’s
Thermopylae.

The sequel to this Russian seizure of Manchuria in a.d. 1897-1900,
like the sequel to the preceding Japanese victory over China in a.d.
1894-5, was to demonstrate the vanity of Militarism. It was in vain that
the Russians sought to consolidate their territorial gains in the Far
East, and to prepare the way for extending them farther, by pressing
a new-fangled Western mechanical invention into the sendee of the
archaic crime of military aggression. The Russian-built railway linking
Vladivostok and Port Arthur with St. Petersburg notably surpassed
the North American transcontinental railways in its length, and

336 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

challenged comparison with them in the rapidity of its construction; 1 yet,
in performing this feat, the Russian railway engineers were working
unwittingly for the Japanese. The South Manchurian section of the
Russian-built railway-system was transferred to Japanese hands in the
peace-settlement following the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese
War of a.d. 1904-5; and, a generation later, Russia was compelled to
advertise her then still unretrieved military inferiority to Japan in the
Far Eastern zone of contact between the two Powers by agreeing to the
forced sale to Japan, at a derisory price, of the trunk line of the Russian
transcontinental railway within the frontiers of the newly conquered
Japanese puppet state of ‘Manchukuo’. 2 When Japanese militarism, in
its turn, met with its nemesis at American hands, Russia was enabled—
as an incidental consequence of American prowess in naval warfare and
in atomic physics—to take her revenge for forty-three years of humilia¬
tion 3 by rounding up the once redoubtable Japanese Kwantung Army
in a lightning campaign of twenty-five days. 4 But there was no evidence
that in a.d. 1945 Russia could have defeated Japan in Manchuria if she
had had to depend solely on her own military strength; and, in the
sequel, the sensational resumption of a Russian advance beyond the
limits of Manchuria which had been checked in a.d. 1904-5 by Japanese
arms was accomplished, without any direct Russian military action at
all, through the operation of Russian ideas and ideals on Chinese minds
and hearts.

In spite of the establishment of a Russian Orthodox Christian mission
at Peking since aj). 1689, Russian Orthodox Christianity had never
gained in China any influence comparable to that of a Modern Western
Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. So long as the competition
between the West and Russia for the spiritual conquest of Chinese
souls was conducted on a common Christian basis, the preponderance of
the Western spiritual influence was overwhelming*. But the balance of
impinging alien spiritual forces in the Chinese arena changed when the
substitution of Liberalism for Christianity as the gospel of the West was
followed by the substitution of Communism for Christianity as the
gospel of Russia. Communism could plausibly claim to offer a more
practically relevant remedy than Liberalism for the ills of a society that

1 Except for the loop round the southern end of Lake Baikal, which was not built
till a.d. 1905, the through-connexion linking Vladivostok and Port Arthur via Man¬
churia with the previous rail-head of the Russian railway-system at Chelyabinsk in
Western Siberia was achieved within the deccnnium A.D. 1892-1902.

1 The sale was finally transacted on the 23rd March, 1935, a ^ ter negotiations that it
had taken the best part of a year to carry through to completion.

’ The writer of this Study realized how extreme this Russian humiliation was when,
on the 24th November, 1929, in the course of a visit to Port Arthur under Japanese rule,
he was taken by his Japanese cicerone to see the Japanese officers’ club there. This had
been the Russian officers’ club before the fall of Port Arthur on the 2nd January, 1905,
and, as a memorial of their victory, the Japanese inheritors of the establishment had
kept all the Russian appointments exactly as they had found them. One feature that
vividly impressed itself on the writer’s memory was a room decorated with a series of
coloured prints depicting Russian victories in the Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1877-8.
In A.D. 1929 the Japanese occupants of the building manifestly relished the irony of this
display, and, no doubt, in a . d . 1945 the Russians equally savoured the pleasure of taking
their club over again from interloping tenants who hud not dreamed that their conscien¬
tious care-taking was to be, after all, for the benefit of the original owners.

* 9th August to 2nd September, 1945.

THE MODERN WEST AND ITS CONTEMPORARIES 337
was being worsted by the problem of a peasantry whose expectations had
been heightened while its habits remained unchanged; and by a.d. 1952
the programme of the Chinese Communist leaders had not yet been
discredited by a discrepancy between profession and practice which had
already destroyed the credit of the Kuomintang.

Thus in China, as in other living non-Western societies, the middle
years of the twentieth century of the Christian Era witnessed the deliver}'
of a Russian challenge to the influence of a Modern Western Civilization
which had appeared to have the whole World at its feet before the out¬
break of the First World War in a.d. 1914.

7. Characteristics of the Encounters between the Modern West and its
Contemporaries up to date

We have now surveyed at least the principal examples of encounters
with the Modern Western Civilization up to the points at which these
still continuing dramas had arrived by the time of writing, and, in the
process, we have also taken note of a number of encounters, since the
turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era, between
living non-Western civilizations. Neither of these fields has been covered
in our survey completely. There are encounters which involved the
Modern West, and contemporary encounters to which the Modern
West was not a party, that have not been included in our review. 1 Yet

1 In the field of encounters to which the Modem West was a party, we have cited
the Zoroastrian diaspori in India as an historical counterpart of the Jewish diaspoii in
the West without entering into the history of the relations between the Parsees and the
Modem Western World since the establishment of direct intercourse between the West
and India in a.d. 1498; and we have not taken any account of the Modem Western
World's relations with the surviving Nestorian, Monophysite, and ex-Monothelete
Christian fossils of an extinct Syriac Society, which, like the Zoroastrian and Jewish
fossils deposited in a previous chapter of history, were products of a long-continuing
collision and conflict between the Syriac Civilization and Hellenism. By the middle of
the twentieth century the Nestorian Assyrians of ‘Ir 5 q, the Zagros, and Malabar, the
Monophysite Gregorian Armenians, Jacobite Syrians, and Coptic Egyptians and Abys-
sinians, and the ex-Monothelete Maronites of the Lebanon, had all yielded to the impact
of the Modem Western Civilization in some degree. Every one of these fossil Oriental
churches had lost converts to Tridentinc Roman Catholic and to Protestant Western
Christianity (though the seventeenth-century Malabari Nestorian converts to Roman
Catholicism had transferred their allegiance, in the third Quarter of the seventeenth
century, to the Monophysite Patriarch of Antioch); and in ail of them likewise the un¬
converted majorities had come under the influence of a secularized Modern Western
culture. The same secular Modem Western influence had also made itself felt on the
Hinayanian Buddhist relics of an extinct Indie culture in Ceylon, Burma, Siam, and
Cambodia, and in Ceylon there had been conversions from Hinayanian Buddhism to both
Roman Catholic and Protestant Western Christianity.

In the economic unification of the World on a Modern Western basis by Modem
Western enterprise the economic resources of insular and continental South-East Asia
—beginning with spices and passing on to rice, rubber, tin, teak, coffee, and quinine—
had come to play an outstandingly important part, and the opportunities thus opened up
under Western auspices had drawn into South-East Asia an inflow of Chinese and
Hindu and Hadhramawti Arab business men and industrial workers. By the time of
writing, the Hinayanian Buddhist populations of the South-East Asian mainland and
the Sunni Muslim and Protestant and Roman Catholic Christian populations of the
Malayan Peninsula, Sumatra, Java, Celebes, and the Philippines were feeling this con¬
vergent pressure from the giant societies on either side of them, and an historian could
foresee a resolution of this multiple interplay of cultural forces into the simpler but more
formidable issue of the locus of the future line of demarcation between a Chinese and a
Hindu Society in a South-East Asia where the indigenous populations would have been
submerged after the elimination of their ephemeral Western masters or protectors.

There had been other encounters since the close of the fifteenth century between

338 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the evidence that we have examined in the preceding chapters is perhaps
sufficient to allow us to draw some general conclusions from it.

The most significant of the conclusions that suggest themselves is that
the word ‘modern’ in the term 'Modern Western Civilization’ can, with¬
out inaccuracy, be given a more precise and concrete connotation by being
translated ‘middle-class’. Western communities became ‘modern’, in
the accepted Modern Western meaning of the word, just as soon as they
had succeeded in producing a bourgeoisie that was both numerous enough
and competent enough to become the predominant element in Society. 1
We think of the new chapter of Western history that opened at the turn
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as being ‘modern’ par excellence
because, for the next four centuries and more, until the opening of a
‘post-Modcrn Age’ at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
the middle class was in the saddle in the larger and more prominent part
of the Western World as a whole. Yet, throughout this so-called ‘Modern
Age’, there were fringes of the Western World—in Eastern Europe,
Southern Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and Latin America—that had
never completely ceased to be ‘medieval’ in terms of this qualitative and
not merely chronological test, while conversely, by the same test, the
abortive city-state cosmos in Central and Northern Italy, Western
Germany, the Low Countries, and the Hansa Towns was already
‘modern’ in the Later Middle Ages.

This definition of the Modern Western culture as being a phase of
Western cultural development that is distinguished by the ascendancy
of the middle class throws light on the conditions under which, before
the advent in the West of a post-Modcrn Age marked by the rise of an
industrial urban working class, any alien recipients of this Modern
Western culture would be likely to be successful in making it their own.
During the currency of the Modem Age of Western history the ability of
aliens to become Westerners would be proportionate to their capacity
for entering into the middle-class Western way of life.

This tentative conclusion is manifestly borne out by the facts when
wc test it by reference to cases of Westernization from below upwards.
In the indigenous social structure of Greek Orthodox Christian, Chinese,
and Japanese life, for example, there were elements that had some
affinity with the middle-class clement in the impinging Western Society;
and the Westernization of the Greeks and the Chinese was undoubtedly
facilitated, governed, and limited by the pace and extent of their progress

living non-Western civilizations to which the Modem West had not been a patty even
temporarily or indirectly. While the impact of the Modern West had affected the rela¬
tions of the ex-Monothelete, Monophysite, and Nestorian Christian subjects of the Otto¬
man Empire with their Muslim neighbours, and the relations of the Parsecs and ’Saint
Thomas’s Christians’ in India with their Hindu neighbours, there had been no Western
intervention in the sixteenth-centuiy competition between Sunni Islam and the Tantric
Mahayanian Buddhism of Tibet for the conversion of still pagan Nomads on the
Eurasian Steppe, none in the eighteenth-century collision between the Lamas' Calmuck
converts and the Chinese main body of the Far Eastern Society, and none in the nine¬
teenth-century collision between this indigenous Far Eastern culture and the Far East¬
ern outposts of the Islamic World in the Tarim Basin, the North-Western Chinese
provinces of Kansu and Shensi, and the South-Western Chinese province of Yunnan.

* i.e. to become the iroXirfvua, as this predominant element was conveniently desig¬
nated in the technical terminology of Hellenic political science (sec VI. vii. 373, n. 1).

THE MODERN WEST AND ITS CONTEMPORARIES 3 39

in developing these existing rudiments into a full-blown middle class in
the Modem Western sense.' In these two Westernizing movements from
below upwards the progress was gradual and was frequently checked by
set-backs, but, as far as it went, it did result in the formation of a genuine
middle class in these originally non-Western social milieux. On the
other hand in cases in which the process of Westernization proceeded
from above downwards—and Japan, as we have seen, 2 changed over to
this alternative approach after the Meiji Revolution—the autocrats who
set themselves to Westernize their subjects by fiat did not think of wait¬
ing for an unforced process of social evolution to provide them with
authentic middle-class agents of indigenous origin for the execution of
their Westernizing policy; and, since it was manifestly impracticable
even for the most energetic autocrat to carry out a Westernizing policy
single-handed, and even for autocrats who were Western conquerors of
a non-Wcstern society to propagate their alien way of life solely through
the agency of Western-born administrators and missionaries without
enlisting the aid of native converts, the high-handed apostles of Western¬
ization from above downwards were constrained in every case to provide
themselves with an artificial substitute for a home-grown middle class by
manufacturing an intelligentsia.

The intelligentsias 3 thus called into existence in Russia, the Islamic
and Hindu worlds, and Japan in response to the ubiquitous challenge of
the impact of the Modern West were, of course, successfully imbued by
their makers with a genuine tincture of middle-class qualities—as was
demonstrated by their partial success in inducting into a middle-class
Modern Western way of life the non-Western societies from which they
had been recruited. The Russian case suggests, however, that even this
partial success might be only provisional and ephemeral. In Russia, as we
have seen, 4 Peter the Great’s policy of adopting the Modern Western
way of life in its orthodox middle-class form had been violently repu¬
diated 228 years after Peter’s effective advent to power in a.d. 1689. It
had been supplanted in a.d. 1917 by the alternative policy of pressing
forward with the acquisition and application of a Modem Western
technology as an instrument for combating the orthodox middle-class
Western ideology of Liberalism in the name of the heretical anti¬
bourgeois Western ideology of Marxism. This Marxian heresy had be¬
come the creed of a Russian intelligentsia which had originally been
called into existence by the Petrine Tsardom to carry out the mission of
bringing Russia into the middle-class Western fold; and, for at least
three generations before the explosion on the political surface of life in
the second Russian revolution of a.d. 1917, an anti-bourgeois animus
in the hearts of a nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia had been
finding a literary vent in the works of Russian writers. 5 The wider
significance of this chapter of Russian history lay in the fact that the

* In Japan, however, the commercial and industrial leaders of the Meiji Era were
recruited, not from the commercial class of the Tokugaw* Era, but from the Samurai,
according to Sansom, G. B.: Japan. A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset
Press), p. 501.

1 On pp. 327-8, above. J See V. v. 154-9*

« On pp. 133-6, above. * See, for example, pp. 699-701, below.

34 ° ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
movement for Westernization from above downwards had been started
in Russia a hundred years earlier than in the Islamic, Hindu, and
Japanese worlds; for this chronological datum suggested that the latest
turn of events in Russia might be an augury of one of the possibilities
that were lying in wait for those other non-Western worlds in chapters of
their histories that were still in the future at a date mid-way through the
twentieth century. The possibility that these other histories in their
turn might eventually take a Russian course was, indeed, something
more than a mere theoretical induction from the Russian historical
precedent. It was also implicit in an affinity between the Far Eastern,
Hindu, and Islamic intelligentsias and the Russian intelligentsia that
was already a matter of observable fact.

In the light of this anti-bourgeois turn which the Russian intelligentsia
had already taken and towards which the other intelligentsias might be
tending, it is perhaps worth pausing to look into the likenesses and the
differences between the non-Western intelligentsias and the Western
middle class whose role they had been commissioned to play in a non-
Western social environment.

One important common characteristic of the Western middle class and
the latter-day non-Westcrn intelligentsias was their common provenance
from beyond the original pale of the societies in which they had succeeded
eventually in establishing themselves. In studying the encounter between
the Western Society and the Jewish diaspora in its midst, 1 we have
observed that the Western Society when it first emerged in the Dark
Ages, like the surviving non-Western societies when they first collided
with the West in its modem phase, was an agrarian society in whose life
the urban pursuits of industry, commerce, and finance were exotic and
were originally practised—in so far as they were practised at all—by an
alien Jewish diaspork, until a Gentile Western middle class was called
into being by the Western Gentiles’ aspiration to be their own Jews. The
abiding affinity of the Western middle class with a diaspora of the type
represented by Western Jewry—a community uprooted from the soil
and addicted to peculiarly urban occupations—was demonstrated, long
after the Gentile Western middle class had captured from the country¬
folk the key position of being the dominant element in Society, by the
alacrity and ease with which the Armenian Gregorian and Greek Ortho¬
dox Christian diasporas in the Ottoman World, and the Parsec diaspork
in India, acclimatized themselves to the way of life of a Modem Western
middle-class society. Conversely the Parsec or Armenian or Greek
Westernized business man who came to work in New York or London
and to sleep in Connecticut or Sussex appeared hardly more alien in the
local farmer’s eyes than the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ business man who shuttled
to and fro in the same suburban trains between the same dormitories and
offices. In a twentieth-century American or English farmer’s sight, all
his urban middle-class contemporaries—the W'csternized and the native
Western alike—were still as exotic as a Cordovan or Tarragonese Jew
had once been in the eyes of a sixth-century peasant in Visigothia.

This quaintly invidious appearance of being ‘pariahs in power’ in the
1 On pp. 276 and 284-6, above.

THE MODERN WEST AND ITS CONTEMPORARIES 341
eyes of unuprooted cultivators of the soil was not the only point of like¬
ness between the Modern Western middle class and the contemporary
intelligentsias. Another point in common between them was that both
had won their eventual dominance by revolting against their original
employers. In Holland, Great Britain, the United States, France, and
other Western countries the middle class had successively come into
power by stepping into the shoes of enlightened monarchies whose
patronage had inadvertently made the middle class’s fortune. In non-
Western polities in the Late Modern Age of Western history the intelli¬
gentsia had likewise come into power by successfully revolting against
Westernizing autocrats who had been, not the inadvertent makers of
their fortunes, but the deliberate authors of their existence. 1

These points of likeness between intelligentsias called into existence
in non-Western societies by Westernizing autocrats and a Western
middle class whose role these intelligentsias were called upon to play
are offset by at least one signal difference. The middle class that made
itself paramount in the Western World in the Modern Age of Western
history was an indigenous element in the society that it eventually came
to dominate, in spite of its having had no place in that society’s original
social order. The history of the gradual and arduous ascent of this
Western middle class from the lowly outskirts of the Western social
hierarchy to its centre and summit was the history of the Western

1 If we take a synoptic view of this common episode in the histories of Petrine Russia,
a latter-day Ottoman Empire, and the British Raj in India, we shall see that the revolt
of the intelligentsia not only occurred in all three cases but came to a head in each case
after the lapse of approximately the same span of time, reckoning from the initial dates
of the respective Westernizing movements. In Russia the abortive Decembrist Revolu¬
tion of a.d. 182s. which was the Russian intelligentsia’s declaration of war on the Petrine
Tsardom, broke out rt6 years after Peter’s effective advent to power in A.D. 1689. In
India political 'unrest' began to reveal itself in Bengal towards the close of the nineteenth
century, rather less than 140 years after the British occupation of Bengal in A.D. 1757 ”
60. In the Ottoman Empire the Committee of Union and Progress overthrew Sultan
‘Abd-al-Hamid II in a.d. 1908, 134 years after the Porte had first been impelled, by
the shock of defeat in the Great Russo-Turkish War of A.D. 1768-74, to begin training
its Muslim subjects in appreciable numbers in a Modem Western art of war which had
so signally demonstrated its efficacy at the Turk*’ expense when it had been employed
against them even by Russian novices in the use of Western technology.

At this point we need not take up the question, raised in XI. ix. 187, below, whether
the remarkable uniformity in the length of the time that it took for the revolt of the in¬
telligentsia to come to a head in these three cases was a fortuitous coincidence or was the
uniform effect of the operation of some constant psychological 'law'. We will merely
note, in passing, that the argument in favour of the second of these two alternative
possible explanations is supported by the reappearance of the same Time-span in a fourth
case which, if not exactly parallel, "is at least analogous. There was an interval of 138
years between the ‘Osmanlis’ defeat before the Walls of Vienna in A.D. 1683, which
moved them to continue and extend the experiment of employing Phanariot Greek
Orthodox Christian subjects of the Porte in responsible positions in the Ottoman public
service, and the Greek uprising of a.d. 1821, which took place partly under Phanariot
leadership. The parallel is not exact, because the Phanariots were not an intelligentsia
which the Porte had called into existence; they were an embryonic Greek counterpart of
the contemporary Western middle class who had made their fortunes by their own
private enterprise and, in the process, had already acquired a familiarity with the West
and its ways which opened a door for their entry into the Ottoman public service as soon
as the Porte found itself obliged to negotiate with Western Powers to whom it was no
longer strong enough to dictate. In these circumstances, Phanariots had already been
appointed to key posts in the Ottoman sendee in the generation preceding the Ottoman
catastrophe of A.D. 1683. The * 3 $ >’ ears running from A.D. 1683 to 1821 were, however,
those during which the Porte was so dependent on its Phanariot servants’ knowledge
of the Western World that the period may be described as a distinctively Phanariot
Age of Ottoman administrative history.

342 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Society’s own spontaneous self-development. By contrast, the artificially
manufactured intelligentsias suffered from the double handicap of being
both novi homines and exotics. They would never even have come into
existence, and would certainly never have come into power, if the non-
Western societies on to whose stems they were grafted had not collided
with a Modern Western World that was so far superior to these other
societies in potency that they found themselves confronted with a
choice between Westernizing and going under. The non-Western intelli¬
gentsias, unlike the Western middle class, were products and symptoms
of their societies' discomfiture in encounters with a Western World
which had been raised, by the rise of an indigenous middle class, to a
height of prosperity and power at which it was more than a match for
all its contemporaries. In short, the Western middle class stood for
strength, whereas the Westernizing intelligentsias spelled weakness.

The intelligentsias, for their part, were sensitively aware of this in¬
vidious difference between themselves and the Western middle class;
for the task of coping with this aggressive adversary was the intelli¬
gentsias’ raison d’Stre, and they were condemned to spend themselves in
this distressingly unequal contest on behalf of members of their own
household from whom they had inevitably been alienated in the act of
being trained to perform a social service that was as exotic from the
standpoint of their native cultural tradition as it was vital in a world over
which the West had cast its shadow. Their intuition of the thanklessness
of their task conspired with an unavowed but inexorable nervous
strain arising from the inherent contradictions in their social situation to
breed in the intelligentsias a smouldering hatred of a Western middle
class which was both their sire and their banc, their cynosure and their
bugbear; and their excruciatingly ambivalent attitude towards this pirate
sun, whose captivated planets they were, is poignantly conveyed in
Catullus’s elegiac couplet:

Odi ct amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior . 1

These two lines of Latin poetry enunciated the inexhaustible theme of a
nineteenth-century Westernizing Russian literature whose masterpieces
ran to many volumes; and this testament of a Russian intelligentsia that
had been able to relieve its own malaise by the masterly exercise of a
singular gift for self-expression faithfully mirrored the experience of
other intelligentsias, sentenced to the same Psyche’s task, whose un¬
uttered woes might have been ignored if they had not found Russian
spokesmen.

The intensity of an alien intelligentsia’s hatred of the Western middle
class gave the measure of that intelligentsia’s foreboding of its own in¬
ability to emulate Western middle-class achievements. The classic in¬
stance, up to date, in which this embittering prescience had been justified
by the event was the Russian intelligentsia’s catastrophic failure, after
the first of the two Russian revolutions in a.d. 1917, to carryout its
fantastic mandate to transform the wreck of the Petrine Tsardom into a
1 Catullus, Q.V.: Carmina, No. lxxxv.

THE MODERN WEST AND ITS CONTEMPORARIES 3 43
parliamentary constitutional state in the nineteenth-century Western
style. The Kerensky regime was a fiasco because it was saddled with the
impracticable task of making bricks without straw. The Modern Western
political system of responsible parliamentary government had been the
creation of a middle class which had been sufficiently competent, experi¬
enced, prosperous, and numerous to come into political power when the
time was ripe for it. In the social structure of the Russia of a . d . 1917 there
was no corresponding element, and the Petrine Russian intelligentsia’s
inability to take a robust Western middle class’s massive responsibilities
on its own lean shoulders was demonstrated by its speedy collapse under
the crushing weight of this unnatural burden. In this classic Russian
instance, however, in which the action had been carried farther, mid¬
way through the twentieth century of the Christian Era, than in the
history of any other encounter with the Modern West, the sequel had
been no less quick in showing that an intelligentsia’s failure to emulate
the peculiar political achievement of the Western middle class was no
evidence of inability' to build any political structure of any kind. In
Russia the same year a . d . 1917 that witnessed Kerensky’s swift failure
also witnessed Lenin’s enduring success.

In Russia, before the year a.d. 1917 ran out, Lenin founded a polity
of an original type which, in contrast to Kerensky’s abortive essay in
a conventional Western parliamentary rdgime, was constructed, not in
obedience to a priori theory, but with a practical eye for dealing with an
actual situation. As we have noticed in another context, 1 Lenin’s objec¬
tive was to repeat, and thereby salvage, Peter the Great's achievement
of saving Russia from succumbing to the aggression of a technologically
superior Western World by driving the Russian people to catch up with
the vanguard of contemporary’ Western technological progress. Lenin
faced the hard fact that this painful forced march could be exacted from
an already exhausted people only by the discipline of the drill-sergeant’s
rod; and the particular form of dictatorial regime that he devised for his
particular purpose took account of the momentary social exigencies of
a Modern Western technology in its twentieth-century phase, besides
conforming to a more general and enduring historical ‘law’ which de¬
creed that the material gains of a revolutionary advance must always be
paid for by losses of corresponding magnitude in the currency of liberty.

Lenin’s political device for engineering a revolutionary Russian
advance on a twentieth-century Western technological front was a per¬
sonal dictatorship underpinned by the unanimous support of a unique
political party that was to merit and retain its monopoly of power by the
discrimination with which it selected its recruits, the fanaticism with
which it indoctrinated its novices, and the discipline which it imposed
on its full-fledged members. In its embodiment of this idea and these
ideals, Lenin’s All-Union Communist Party was not, of course, entirely
without precedent. In Iranic Muslim history it had been anticipated
in the Slave-Household of the Ottoman Padishah, 1 in the Qyzylbash
fraternity of devotees of the Safawis, 1 and in a Sikh KhSlsa that had been

« On pp. 139-41, above. 1 Sec III. iii. 31-47-

s See I. i. 366-8 and V. v. 661-5.

344 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
called into being in a subjugated Hindu World by a decision to fight a
Mughal ascendancy with its own weapons. 1 In these older Hindu and
Islamic fraternities the ethos of the Russian heresiarch’s Communist
Party is already unmistakably discernible. Lenin’s claim to originality
rests on his independence in reinventing this formidable political instru¬
ment for himself and on his priority in applying it to the special purpose
of enabling a non-Westem society to hold its own against the Modern
West by mastering the latest devices of a Modern Western technology
without embracing the ideology that was the current Modern Western
norm of orthodoxy.

The effectiveness with which this purpose was served by the Leninian
single-party type of dictatorial regime was indicated by the frequency
with which it was consciously imitated or inadvertently reproduced in
the contemporary political history of other non-Westcrn societies that
were traditionally hostile to Russia but found themselves in the same
predicament in a world in which ‘the Western Question’ had come to be
ubiquitous.

In the Kuomintang regime established at Canton by Sun Yat-sen in
a.d. 1921 a tincture of Russian Communism was deliberately introduced
by the Chinese philosopher-statesman in a.d. 1923 ; z and, in the subse¬
quent history of the Kuomintang National Government of China, the
Leninian form of political constitution—a personal dictatorship sup¬
ported by a unique party—significantly survived the breach which
opened in a.d. 1927 between the Kuomintang and a Chinese Communist
Party which had sought to take advantage of its affiliation to the Kuo¬
mintang in order to gain control of the National Government from
within. 3 Though the Chinese Communists’ rival pretensions were based
on a claim to be genuine exponents of a Leninism which was admit¬
tedly diluted with Liberalism in the Kuomintang’s ideology, the Kuo¬
mintang did not demonstrate the sincerity of its unfeigned eagerness
to dissociate itself from Communism by repudiating the Leninian
element in its own constitution and doctrine. The exigencies of a com¬
mon predicament constrained a now bitterly anti-Russian Chinese
ex-revolutionary party to continue to handle ‘the Western Question’
according to the inevitable Russian political prescription. From a.d. 1927
to a.d. 1949, when the Chinese Communists swept the Kuomintang off
the Chinese political chess-board, the pious assurance in the Kuomin¬
tang’s creed that ‘the period of tutelage’, which was the second of the
three stages of revolution prescribed by Sun Yat-sen, was to be followed
in due course by an unrestrictedly democratic dispensation was still just

• See V. v. 665-8.

1 On returning to Canton in the summer of a.d. 1923 after a temporary loss of his
foothold there in a.d. 1922, Sun Yat-sen brought with him as his political adviser
a representative of the Soviet Government at Moscow, Michael Borodin (see Survey
of International Affairs, 1925, vol. ii (London 1928, Milford), p. 311). The members
of the Chinese Communist Party, which had been formed circa a.d. 1920 (see Survey of
International Affairs, 1926 (London J92S, Milford), p. 240, n. x), were admitted to
membership in the Kuomintang at the beginning of a.d. 1924 (see Survey of International
Affairs, 1927 (London 1929. Milford), p. 333).

3 The Chinese Communist Party fell foul of the right wing of the Kuomintang at
Nanchang in March 1927 and of the left wing of the Kuomintang at Hankow in June
1927 (see Survey of International Affairs, 1927 (London 1929, Milford), pp. 331-65).

THE MODERN WEST AND ITS CONTEMPORARIES 3 4 S
as far from fulfilment 1 as the even more pious assurance in the Russian
Marxist book of revelation that ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ was
to fade out at long last through a withering away of the state itself.

The adoption of the Leninian type of polity in China was not so remark¬
able, however, as its adoption in Turkey; for, by the time when, on the
morrow of the First World War, Mustafa Kcmal Atatiirk established his
revolutionary dictatorship more Rustico, Russia had been Turkey’s
traditional ‘Enemy Number One’ for 150 years past, and a Russian
provenance would have been enough in itself to discredit any idea or
institution in Turkish eyes if this strong initial prejudice had not been
overridden by some ineluctable necessity. The reason why patriotic-
minded Turks were willing to take a lesson from Russia in this case was
that their chastening experience of defeat in the First World War at the
hands of technologically superior Western Powers had made the Turks,
like the Russians, acutely aware that they must put themselves through
a Westernizing technological revolution if they wished to survive; and
the Turks, like the Russians, perceived that they could not carry out this
revolutionary social manoeuvre unless they fell into the Leninian politi¬
cal formation of a comitatus at the heels of a dictator. Turkey’s happy
issue out of an urgently necessary revolution that had been accomplished
at this temporary cost was declared w’hen, on the 14th May, 1950, a party
which by that date had been monopolizing political power in the
country for twenty-seven years peacefully gave way to an opposition
party by which it had been defeated in a genuinely free parliamentary
general election.

Both the 'lurks and the Chinese could go to school in a Russian
political academy without ‘loss of face’, since, like the Russians, they
were heirs of non-Western cultures at bay against the Modern West,
while, in their grim common race against Time to find a solution for an
ubiquitous ‘Western Question’, it was manifest that the Russians were
considerably ahead of all their fellow runners. A more impressive tribute
(though it was a left-handed compliment) was paid to the Russian
intelligentsia’s political genius during the inter-war years in a mimesis
of the Leninian polity in two great Western countries—Italy and
Germany—where the local representatives of the Western middle class
had failed to display the political ability of their brethren on the Atlantic
seaboard without being their inferiors in an aptitude for technology
that was the distinctive characteristic of Modern Western Man.

In Germany and Italy the Fascist and National Socialist imitations of
the Communist Russian totalitarian state had run headlong into disaster
within the lifetimes of their makers. In China a Kuomintang regime—
in which a Leninian combine of dictator and comitatus had been in¬
congruously overlaid with an appliqu6-work of Western liberal political
motifs—had been ousted in a.d. 1949 by a Communist regime which
claimed to be a faithful Chinese copy of an original Russian new model.
In Russia this original Leninian polity had survived the tremendous

> See, for example, the passage of the Government Organization Law, promulgated
at Nanking on the 3rd October, 1928, which is quoted in Survey 0]International Affairs,
1928 (London 1929, Milford), p. 389.

346 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
ordeal of a Second World War to emerge as a rallying-point for all
the forces still in the field against the ascendancy of the West over the
World, and as the mighty antagonist of the United States if a devastating
twentieth-century competition for world power were ever to be carried
into a fatal final round. In Turkey, in contrast to Italy and Germany, a
dictator who had introduced the Leninian polity there as a Russian
means to a non-Communist end had died in his bed and had transmitted
his dictatorship to a less demonic successor; and this successor and his
partisans had afterwards demonstrated the sincerity of their conversion
to the parliamentary democratic political ideals of the West by relinquish¬
ing office in obedience to the verdict of a parliamentary election in which
they had not misused their power in order to ‘rig’ the results in their own
favour, contrary to the will of the electorate.

This bewildering diversity of the mid-twentieth-century political
landscape in non-Westcm or ex-Western provinces of a West-ridden
World was one of many indications that the drama of the Modern West’s
encounter with the other living civilizations was then still in an early
act even on the political plane of action, and a fortiori far from its denoue¬
ment at deeper levels; and this conclusion would suggest that our survey
of encounters with the Modern Western Civilization up to date had
yielded all the illumination that it was capable of yielding at the time of
writing. If a twentieth-century observer was to carry his study of en¬
counters between civilizations farther, he must turn away from the
spectacle of an uncompleted drama, in which the Modern Western
Civilization was the protagonist, to consider the histories of other en¬
counters in which the whole story lay within his ken because the play
had here already been played out to a finish.

(b) ENCOUNTERS WITH MEDIEVAL WESTERN CHRISTENDOM

r. The Flow and Ebb of the Crusades 1

Ex hypothesi the whole story of the encounters between a Medieval
Western Christendom and its neighbours was known to the writer of
this Study and his contemporaries, since this story must have come
to an end before the beginning of the subsequent story in w r hich
a Modern Western Society was the principal character. These two
successive stories of encounters in which the Western Civilization was
involved had at least one feature in common: in both episodes the
Westerners had been the aggressors. In these two successive outbreaks,
however, the Western aggressors had followed different paths with
different consequences. In their modern outbreak, as we have seen, they
had taken ship from the Atlantic seaboard of Western Europe and had
found their way over the Ocean to all quarters of the globe; in their
medieval outbreak—for which a convenient short title was 'the Crusades’
in the broadest usage of the word 2 —they had taken ship from the
Mediterranean seaboard of Western Europe for the Levant, or ridden
out across the open eastern land-frontier of their Western Christian

1 See xi, map. 41.

* Sec I. i. 38 and V. v. 242-4.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 47

World into the adjoining domains of Orthodox Christendom in South-
East Europe and in Russia. In conquering the World through mastering
the Ocean, the Modern Westerners had been pioneers in an oecumenical
adventure of which the issue was still hidden in the future mid-way
through the twentieth century of the Christian Era. On the other hand
in invading Dar-al-Isl 5 m and Orthodox Christendom the Medieval
Western Christians had been treading in the Hellenic footprints of
Alexander the Great and Titus Quinctius Flamininus on well-worn
tracks that had led them to the source of their religion at Jerusalem and
the source of their secular culture at Athens. 1

The medieval outbreak of the Western Society in the eleventh century
of the Christian Era was as surprisingly abrupt as its modern outbreak
at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the eventual
collapse of the medieval Western adventure came as swiftly as its initial
success. An intelligent observer from India, China, or Japan who had
made his way to the other end of the Old World in the fifth or sixth
decade of the thirteenth century of the Christian Era would have been
as unlikely to foresee that the Western intruders were on the verge of
being expelled from both ‘Dar-al-Islam’ 1 and ‘Romania’ 3 as he would
have been—had he arrived on the scene three hundred years earlier—to
foresee that these same two worlds were at that date on the verge of being
attacked and overrun by the hitherto apparently backward and ineffective
natives of the far western extremity of the cultivated visitor’s Oikoumcni.

As soon as he had learnt to distinguish the two Hellenistic Christian
societies from a Hellenising Syriac Society 4 which was in process of
conversion from the Monophysite and Nestorian Christian heresies and
Zoroastrianism to the all but Christian heresy of Islam, 5 our imaginary
tenth-century Far Eastern observer would probably have come to the
conclusion that, of these three local competitors for the command of
the Mediterranean Sea and its hinterlands, Orthodox Christendom had
the best prospects and Western Christendom the worst.

On the divers tests of the competing societies’ comparative standing
in wealth, education, administrative efficiency, and success in war,
Orthodox Christendom would assuredly have come out at the top of our
mid-tcnth-ccntury observer’s list, and Western Christendom at the
bottom. Western Christendom in that generation was an agrarian society
in which urban life was exotic 6 and coin a rare currency, whereas in
contemporary Orthodox Christendom there was a money economy
based on an efficient and prosperous commerce and industry-. 7 In
Western Christendom the clergy alone was literate, whereas in Orthodox
Christendom there was a lay governing class that was not merely literate
but was educated in the high culture of an extinct Hellenic Society to
which both the Christendoms were affiliated. 8 On the political plane,

1 Sec I. i. 19 and X. ix. 100-1. 1 The derelict domain of the Caliphate.

> The derelict domain of the East Roman Empire.

♦ See p. 408, with n. 5, below.

s For this Christian aspect of Islam, see the quotation from N&ldeke and Schwally
in V. v. 230, n. 4. For the replacement of Monophysite and Nestorian Christianity by
Islam in the Syriac World, sec xi, maps 38 and 39.

6 See pp. 276 and 284-6, above.

* See IV. iv. 344.

* See IV.iv. 345-6-

348 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Western Christendom was living in a state of anarchy into which it had
been plunged by the speedy failure of the semi-barbarian war-lord
Charlemagne’s over-ambitious attempt to erect a replica of the Roman
Empire on this unpropitious terrain, whereas in Orthodox Christendom
the revival of the Roman Empire by Leo Syrus, two generations before
Charlemagne’s day, had proved itself a success by a record—now more
than two hundred years long—of survival, consolidation, and expansion. 1 *
During the second quarter of the tenth century this renascent East
Roman Empire had begun reconquering from D 5 r-al-Isl 5 m territories
south-east of the Taurus which a moribund Roman Empire had lost in
the seventh century to Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors.* By the same
test the fortunes of the Syriac World must be judged to be now on the
wane; yet, even on this crude and imperfect criterion of ordeal by battle,
the Syriac Society was not yet so far gone in its decline as to have lost
the upper hand in its contest with the barbarous Christians of the West.

After the tide of Muslim conquest had begun to recede on land, it had
continued for a time to advance at sea, and Orthodox Christendom as
well as Western Christendom had been roughly handled in the ninth
century by Maghribi Muslim buccaneers. They had wrested Crete out
of the East Roman Empire’s grasp in a . d . 823 and Sicily in a . d . 840-902;
in a . d . 904, under the leadership of an East Roman renegade, Leo of
Tripoli, they had swooped down upon Salonica, the metropolis of the
East Roman Empire’s surviving possessions in Continental European
Greece; and in a . d . 949 they inflicted a disastrous defeat on an East
Roman expeditionary force that had been commissioned to recapture a
lost command of the Aegean Sea by driving the Maghribi Muslims out
of their provocative Cretan outpost. The East Romans, however, did not
acquiesce in this defeat, and they duly reconquered Crete in a second
expedition in a . d . 961. No similar act of self-help is recorded to the
credit of the Western Christians in the annals of their victimization by
the Maghribi Muslims during the same period of Mediterranean naval
history.

The eighth-century Carolingians’ modest military achievements of
expelling the Arab garrisons from Scptimania 3 and establishing a
Frankish march in the southern foothills of the Eastern Pyrenees 4 had
been more than offset in the ninth century, after the Carolingian
Empire’s collapse, by the Maghribi buccaneers’ audacious seizure of
commanding points in ex-Carolingian territory. Andalusian Muslim
raiders had appeared again in Septimania in a . d . 841. 5 Garde Freynet
(Fraxinetum), overhanging the coast of Provence, had been occupied
circa a.d. 891-4, 6 and an equally well placed stronghold at the mouth of
the Garigliano circa a . d . 885 ; and the Muslim aggressors had not allowed
themselves to be confined to their beach-heads; they had almost suc-

1 See IV. iv. 340-4. . _ * See IV. iv. 399.

3 The date of the Frankish conquest of Narbonne was A.D. 751, according to Lrfvy-

Provencal, E.: Hinoirt dr. I’Etpagne Mutulmane, vol. i (Cairo 1941, Institut Fran^ais
d’Arch^ologic Orientale du Caire), p. 46.

4 Gerona seceded to the Franks in a.d. 785 (ibid., p. 9s); Barcelona was conquered
by them in a.d. 8oj (ibid., pp. 123 and 125-7).

» See ibid., p. 148. 6 See ibid., p. 386.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 349
cccded in cutting Western Christendom in two by pushing inland from
the Riviera and infesting the Alpine passes; 1 and between a . d . 840 and
a . d . 876 they had come equally near to driving a wedge between Western
and Orthodox Christendom by conquering the Lombard country in the
lowlands of Apulia after they had gained a foothold in the intervening
East Roman island of Sicily. The consummation of this Muslim con¬
quest of Apulia had been averted only because its imminence had moved
the East Roman Government to intervene there in a . d . 876;* but, for
the local Western Christian population of Southern Italy, the conse¬
quence had been, not liberation, but merely the substitution of alien
East Roman Orthodox Christian for alien Maghrib! Muslim masters.
Western Christendom’s narrow escape from losing Provence and the
Western Christian parts of Italy to the Maghrib! Muslims 5 in the ninth
and tenth centuries was due, not to Western Christian, but to East
Roman, prowess. 4

On this showing, a mid-tenth-ccntury Far Eastern observer of Far
Western affairs could hardly have failed to forecast that, in this out¬
landish group of barely distinguishable yet mutually antipathetic local
societies, the future lay with Orthodox Christendom, and that, whatever
might be the destiny of the Syriac World, Western Christendom at any
rate had no prospect of emerging from an impotence and obscurity that
were the inevitable penalties of a benighted inefficiency. There can be
little doubt that our observer would have been astonished at the actual
event if he could have lived on to witness it.

A more penetrating vision than could be expected of any contem¬
porary observer, alien or local, might perhaps have caught glimpses
of the realities underlying the deceptive appearances of the mid-tenth-
century scene in the environs of the Mediterranean. The deadly hidden
weaknesses of Orthodox Christendom, which were so soon to be brought
to light and were to become so glaringly evident in retrospect, have been
analysed in this Study already in another context. 5 As for the Syriac
World, it had been enjoying a spell of delusive well-being in a belated
‘Indian Summer’ under a universal state which had been reconstituted

1 The Muslims of Freynet had raided San Gall in a.d. 939 (ibid., p. 387).

3 Sec IV. iv. 343-4.

> During the years A.D. 880-915 the MaghribI Muslim raiders were ranging at will
over Central Italy as far inland as the upper valley of the Tiber (Gay, L'Jlalie MM-
dionale el VEmpire Byzanlin, 867-1071 (Paris 1904, Fontemoing), p. 159).

♦ The Maghribi Muslim stronghold at the mouth of the Garigliano was smoked out
in a.d. 915 by a combined effort of all the Western Christian communities in Central
and Southern Italy under East Roman leadership, and this signal public service con¬
firmed the East Roman Empire’s recently established hegemony over all Western Christ¬
ian Italy south of the duchies of Rome and Spolcto (Gay, op. cit., p. 162). In a.d. 931
and a.d. 942 the East Roman Navy made two unsuccessful attempts to help Hugh of
Provence, who was connected by marriage with the East Roman imperial house of the
day, to smoke the Muslims out of Garde Freynet (Schaube, A.: Handrhpeichiehle der
Romanischen Vdlker dts Miltelmeergebiets bis sum Ende der Kreuzsuge (Munich and
Berlin 1906, Oldcnbourg), p. 98). Thereafter a Western Christendom that had rallied
under the auspices of the Saxon wardens of its north-eastern marches (sec II. ii. 167-8)
did succeed in a.d. 973 in clearing the Maghribi Muslims out of both Garde Freynet
and the Alpine passes by its own efforts (Schaube, op. cit., pp. 98 and 69). Yet, even after
that, the Muslims demonstrated that they still retained their naval command of the
Western Mediterranean by sacking Barcelona on the 7th July, 985 (Schaube, op. cit.,
p. 103; L 6 vy-Provenial, op. cit., p. 435), as they had sacked Genoa in a.d. 935 (Schaube,
op. cit., p. 63). * See IV. iv. 320-408.

350 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
in the shape of the Caliphate, after an Hellenic intrusion which had lasted
for a thousand years, by latter-day Arab restorers of a prematurely
overthrown Achaemenian Empire. 1 In the tenth century of the Christian
Era the truth was that the Syriac Society was nearing the end of an
abnormally prolonged old age, while a still adolescent Orthodox
Christendom was in the more tragic plight of being already stricken
with a mortal disease beneath the surface. Western Christendom had
escaped this fate thanks to the failure of Charlemagne’s attempt to
emulate Leo Syrus’s feat by saddling her with the incubus of a revival
of the Roman Empire; and in the tenth century this apparently feeble
and ineffective Western Society actually possessed hidden springs of
vitality which were soon to well out in titanic activities on every plane
of life.

A discerning observer’s eye might have noticed that a Western
Christian Society which had offered such slight resistance to its Muslim
assailants from the Mediterranean had been valiantly and successfully
fighting for its life against contemporary pagan Scandinavian assailants
from the North Sea 2 and Magyar assailants from the Eurasian Steppe;
and even against the Muslims the West had not been in retreat all along
the line. The humiliating helplessness of Charlemagne’s Frankish
cpigoni in Italy and Provence was balanced in the Iberian Peninsula by
a gradual and inconspicuous but continuous and well-consolidated
advance to the credit of the heirs of the Visigoths. By the second decade
of the tenth century of the Christian Era, which saw the Muslim Power
in the Peninsula raised by the Cordovan Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd-ar-
Rahman III An-Nasir (imperabat A.D. 912-61) to a zenith at which it
continued to stand until its sudden collapse in a.d. 1009, the remnant of
the Kingdom of Visigothia which had survived in the mountain-fast¬
nesses of Cantabria and Asturia had reoccupied all but the headwaters
of the basin of the Douro and, on the west coast, had pushed on beyond
into the valley of the Mondego; 3 and, though ‘Abd-ar-Rahman and his

1 This aspect of the Arab Caliphate as a resumption of the Achaemenian Empire has
been noticed in I. i. 76-77. 1 See II. ii. 194-202.

5 The Arabs had relaxed their hold on the north-west comer of the Iberian Peninsula
while they had been making the attempt to conquer Aquitaine from the Franks which
had ended so disastrously in A.D. 73 * (see L6vy-Provencal, op. cit., p. 49), and the Ber¬
ber colonists of this region had then been weakened first by a series of unsuccessful
revolts against their Arab overlords and afterwards by a re-exodus en masie to North-
West Africa during a five-years' famine circa A.D. 750-5 (ibid., pp. 37 and 50). In con¬
sequence, King Alfonso I of Asturia (regnabal a.d. 739-57) was able to reoccupy the
whole of the Douro (Ducro) Basin from Osma downwards (ibid., pp. 49-50). Oporto,
at the mouth of the Douro, was conquered in A.D. 868 (ibid., p. 223), and Coimbra,
at the mouth of the Mondego, in A.D. 878 (ibid., p. 224). King Alfonso II (regnabal
a.d. 791-842) had actually occupied Lisbon from a.d. 709 to 808/9 (ibid., p. 122).
Garcia I (regnabat a.d. 910-14) transferred the capital of Asturia from Oviedo—the
refugee Pelayo’a fastness between the Asturian mountains and the north coast—to
Le6n at the mountains' southern foot (ibid., p. 305), which the Muslims had retaken in
a.d. 846 but had failed to hold (ibid., p. 144); and in a.d. 9x3, three years before the
opening of 'Abd-ar-Rahmin Ill's counter-offensive, Ordono II had raided Evora
(ibid., p. 305) from his Galician appanage. Alfonso III (regnabal a.d. 866-010) had con¬
solidated Asturia’s gain* by repopulating the devastated marches with Christian
(muila'rib) refugees from territories under Muslim rule (ibid., p. 228); but Asturia still
remained open to invasion from Andalusia round the north-east corner of the Guada-
rrama mountain range so long as the head waters of the Duero remained in Muslim hands—
and, till after the collapse of the Muslim power in the Peninsula in a.d. 1009. San Esteban
de Cormaz and Osma remained the farthest outposts of the Asturian Kingdom towards

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 351
no less puissant successor the dictator Abu ‘Amir Muhammad Al-
Mansur (dominabatur a.d. 981-1002) found themselves able to raid the
Asturian kingdom and its diminutive independent Christian neighbours,
Navarre and Aragon, at will and to compel them to acknowledge
Andalusia’s hegemony, neither of these great Andalusian Muslim soldiers
and statesmen succeeded in permanently rcoccupying, not to speak of
recolonizing, any of the country that had been recovered by Visigothia’s
Asturian successor-state in the course of the century and a half preced¬
ing ‘Abd-ar-Rahman’s accession.

This retransfer of a remote and uninviting corner of the Iberian
Peninsula from Muslim to Western Christian hands, and its still more
significant retention in Christian hands throughout the ordeal of a.d.
qib'-iooq, passed almost unnoticed at the time, but, in retrospect, the
failure of An-Nasir and Al-Mansur to complete a Muslim conquest of
the Peninsula, which had been all but completed, some mo hundred
years before An-Nasir resumed the task, by the first Arab conquistador
Musa b. Nusayr, could be seen to have signified the turn of a tide which
in the following century was to carry the Western Crusaders from the
Douro to the Jordan and beyond; and the shrine of St. James at
Compostela, in this out-of-the-way province which was the first frag¬
ment of D 5 r-al-Isl 3 m to fall into Western Christian hands, was already
becoming second only to Jerusalem itself in attractiveness as a goal for
Western Christian pilgrims. 1

These entries on the credit side of a tenth-century Western Christen¬
dom’s military account are not insignificant, but they are less significant
than their accompaniments on the cultural plane. In France and England
the Scandinavian invaders were not only brought to a halt, but those of
them who were not ejected from the invaded territories were so whole¬
heartedly captivated by a Western Christian culture which they had
failed to wipe out that they became its champions instead of its assailants. 1
In the same century this Western Christian Civilization showed itself
worthy of its new proselytes’ devotion by taking the first step towards
putting its own house in order. The spiritual citadel of Early Medieval
Western Christendom was monasticism, and the tenth-century Cluniac
rejuvenation of the Benedictine way of monastic life was the archetype of
all subsequent Western social reforms, religious and secular.

These unobtrusive signs of fresh life in a tenth-century Western
Christendom are impressive when we bring them to light; yet, even
when they have been given all their due, they seem hardly adequate to
account for the amazing outburst of energy in an eleventh-century
Western Christendom—an outburst in which the outbreak of aggression
against the two neighbouring societies was one of the less creative and
less estimable episodes. At the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries

the South-East (ibid., p. 228). Toward* the North-East, Pampeluna, which had shaken
off the Arab yoke in a.d. 798 (ibid., p. 125), had become the principal city of the in¬
dependent Basque Christian Kingdom of Navarre.

1 This was the year in which 'Abd-ar-Rahman opened his offensive against the
Asturian Christians according to L^vy-Provenqal, op. cit., p. 306.

* Compostela had been a pilgrimage resort since the ninth century (ibid., p. 4 +t).
When Al-Mansllr raided it in a.d. 997, he spared the tomb of the Apostle St. James
(ibid., pp. 440 and 442). » Sec II. li. 201-2.

352 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the Western Christian Civilization followed up its feat of captivating
the Scandinavian interlopers in Normandy and the Danelaw, and
matched the Orthodox Christian Civilization’s contemporary feat of
converting the Scandinavian makers of Russia, by bringing within its
fold the Scandinavian war-bands in their native lairs, as well as the
continental barbarians of Hungary and Poland. 1 In the eleventh century
the fundamental Cluniac reform of Western monastic life was followed
up by the more ambitious Hildcbrandine reform of the whole constitu¬
tion and discipline of the Western Church, while the obscure conquest
of the north-western comer of the Iberian Peninsula was followed up by
a sensational forward movement along the entire length of the Mediter¬
ranean. In the Iberian Peninsula the eleventh-century Western Christian
conquistadores established their ascendancy over the Cordovan Umayyad
Caliphate’s successor-states by conquering Toledo. In the Central
Mediterranean they overran the East Roman Empire’s dominions in
Southern Italy and went on to conquer Sicily from Muslim intruders
on Greek Orthodox Christian ground whom the East Roman Govern¬
ment had first failed to keep out and afterwards failed to eject. In the
Levant, where they were operating at the opposite extremity of the
Mediterranean Basin from their West European base, the Western
Crusaders eclipsed in one expedition all the conquests, at the expense of
the ‘Abbasid Caliphate’s successor-states, which it had taken the East
Romans a century and a half (a.d. 927-1071) to win and one campaign
to lose, by carving out, in and after ‘the First Crusade’ ( gerebatur a.d.
x 095-9), a chain of Western Christian principalities extending continu¬
ously from Antioch and Edessa through Tripoli to Jerusalem. 2

« Sec II. ii. 168 and IV. iv. 378-9.

1 In this eleventh-century forward movement the Normans and the North Italian
maritime city-states Venice, Pisa, and Genoa were active on all three fronts; the North¬
ern French, other than the Normans, made an appearance on the Iberian front (see
V. v. 242, n. 4) and turned out in force to take part in the First Crusade; the
Southern French likewise went into action on the Syrian front, but not (sec Schaubc,
op. tit., p. too) on either the Iberian or the Central Mediterranean front, though these
two theatres of operations lay at their door.

On the Iberian front the Western Christians' eleventh-century successes were mostly
achieved between a.d. 1009, when the Cordovan Muslim power collapsed, and a.d.
1086, when the Murfibit Muslim Berber barbarians from Africa made their first passage
of the Straits of Gibraltar in response to an appeal from some of the Cordovan Cali-

F (hate’s successor-states for help against their Western Christian barbarian assailants
rom Europe. The most important permanent Western Christian advance in the Penin¬
sula in this chapter of history was the conquest of Toledo in A.D. 1085 by King Alfonso
VI of Castile; but. far beyond the limits of the conquered territories, the Western Christ¬
ian transfrontier barbarians exerted their power over the Peninsular Muslim inuluk-at-
taK&'if of the day by raiding their dominions, compelling them to purchase immunity
from raids by paying tribute, and even establishing permanent cantonments of Western
Christinn war-bands in Muslim territore. Garcia Jimenea' cantonment at Aledo (a.d.
1085-92) may be compared with the fifth-century settlements of Visigoths and Bur-

K ndians in the Roman dominions in Gaul, and the Cid’s and his heirs' 'protectorate'
rebalur a.d. 1086-92 and 1094-1102) over the Muslim principality of Valencia with
the fifth-century domination of Ricimer over the Roman Imperial Government at
Ravenna.

On the Central Mediterranean front the Pisans and Genoese were the first to move.
The sack of Genoa by the Maghribi Muslims in a.d. 935 was avenged when the Muslims
were driven out of Sardinia in a.d. iot6 by the combined efforts of the Genoese and the
Pisans and when the Pisans raided Bona in the Maghrib in a.d. 1034 (Schaube, op. cit.,
p. 50). From A.p. 1040 onwards the naval operations of the two North-West Italian
maritime republics on this front were followed up by the conquests of the Normans on
land—though a Pisan attack on Palermo in a.d. 1063 failed for lack of concerted action

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 353

The eventual collapse of the Medieval Western Christian ascendancy
in the Mediterranean Basin that had thus been imposed at one amazing
swoop would have been no less surprising to a Far Eastern observer re¬
surveying the scene 150 years after the First Crusade and 300 years after
the time, half-way through the tenth century, when the fortunes of
Western Christendom had been at their nadir.

In reckoning up the profits and losses of a century and a half of in¬
cessant strife, our imaginary mid-thirteenth-century observer would
have noted that, in their distant and exposed outposts in Syria, the
Western Christian aggressors had lost all their conquests except a few
bridgeheads within three-quarters of a century. The territorial spoils
of the First Crusade (gerebatur a . d . 1095-9) neither been preserved
by the Second Crusade {gerebatur a.d. 1146-9) nor recovered by the
Third {gerebatur a . d . ii 87‘-92), which was the most fiercely contested
of these three successive trials of strength between Western aggressors
and an Islamic World at bay; and the virtuosity of Frederick II Hohen-
staufen’s accommodation with the Ayyubid Kamil in a . d . 1228-9 2 could

on the Normans’ part, while, conversely, a single-handed Norman attack against Palermo
and Girgcnti in a.d. 1064 was likewise a failure, with the consequence that Palermo
was able to hold out against the Normans till A.D. 1072 (Chalandon, F.: Hittoire de la
Domination Normande en Italie et en Sidle (Paris 1907, Picard, 2 vola.), vol. i, pp. 203,
204, and 207-8; Schaube, op. cit., p. so). The Pisans and Genoese did not succeed in
expelling the Muslims from Corsica till a.d. 1091 (sec V. v. 244 and 622, n. 3).

Along the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula the sack of Barcelona by the
Muslims in A.D. 985 was avenged in the conquest of Almcria by the Genoese in A.D.
1046 and in the joint Genoese-Catalan expedition against Tortosa in a.d. 1092-3
(Schaube, op. cit., p. 64). The final demonstration that the ’thalassocracy’ of the Western
Mediterranean Basin had now passed from the Maghrib! Muslims to the Western
Christians was given by the sensational success of the Pisan naval expedition against
Mahdiyah in a.d. 1087. The principality of Mahdiyah was compelled to acknow¬
ledge the suzerainty of the Pope and to open its doors to Pisan and Genoese traders.
The local prince Tamim’s son was earned away captive to Pisa, where he settled
down to serve as town crier (Schaube, op. cit., pp. 50-51)—as Perseus the last king of
Macedon's son Alexander had settled down in his Roman captivity to serve as town clerk
in the rural Latin colony Alba Fucensis.

1 Reckoning the war as beginning with Saladin’s assault on the Kingdom of Jeru¬
salem in A.D. 1187, rather than with the Western Christian counter-attack in A.D. 1x89.

J Frederick’s first move was to make an alliance with KSmil, whose dominions were
at the moment confined to Egypt, against Kamil’s brother Mu'azzam, the prince of
Damascus, whose Syrian dominions were the target of Frederick’s prospective territorial
claims. This astute step was unexpectedly countered by the unforeseen accident of
Mu'azzam’s death, which robbed Kamil’s alliance with Frederick of its original value
in Kamil’s calculations and at the same time gave Kimil a persona! interest in the Syrian
portion of the Ayyubid dominions, which had now passed into his hands. Notwithstand¬
ing this unpropitious change in the situation, Frederick succeeded in persuading Kamil
to cede to him Jerusalem (minus the Haram-ash-Sharif), Bethlehem, and Nazareth,
together with one corridor of territory connecting Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and another
connecting Nazareth, with the surviving bridgeheads of the Kingdom of Jerusalem
along the Syrian coast. This remarkable diplomatic achievement was mainly due to the
moderation shown by both parties in contenting themselves with the satisfaction of their
minimum desiderata. Kimil was content to retain the principal Islamic holy place in
Palestine, without seeking to drive the Franks into the sea, while Frederick was content
to recover the principal Christian holy places in Palestine without seeking once again to
insulate the Asiatic from the African domain of Dir-al-Isl 5 m. A contributory cause of
the settlement of a.d. 1228-9 was Frederick’s ability and readiness to come on to the
other party’s ground. Frederick personally conducted in Arabic his negotiations with
Kamil s envoy Fakhr-ad-Din, and he fraternized with the local Muslims throughout his
stay in the Levant (sec Kantorowicz, E.: Frederick the Second, 1194-1230 (London
1931, Constable), pp. 176-99).

If the Western Christians had been sincere in their profession that the liberation of the
Christian holy places in Palestine was the objective of their military expeditions to the
Levant, they would have been constrained to admit that, after their decisive and

B 2808 . vm N

354 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
not conceal the hard fact that in Syria the invaders had failed—in spite
of the opening offered to them by the decay of the ‘FStimid’ Shl'I
Anticaliphate before the rise of the ‘ Abbasid Sunni Caliphate’s vigorous
AyyQbid successor-state—to achieve their strategic objective of insulat¬
ing the Asiatic from the African and Iberian provinces of D 5 r-al-Islam.
They had also failed to exploit an opportunity in Ifrikiyah of insulating
the Muslim citadel in Egypt from Maghrib-al-AqsS and Andalusia during
the lull between the recession of the ‘FStimid’ wave of Berber invaders
from Eastern Kabylia and the onrush of a mightier wave of Muwahhid
Berber invaders from the Atlas . 1 The bridgeheads that the Norman
kingdom of Sicily had begun to establish along the coasts of Tunisia
and Tripolitania in a . d . 1134 had all been swept away again by a . d .
1158.

In the Iberian Peninsula, on the other hand, all that was left of the
former Islamic domain by the middle of the thirteenth century was an
enclave round Granada; and this was not the only front on which
Western Christendom had been recouping herself for her losses in Syria.
The vigour of the resistance that the Third Crusade had encountered in
colliding with the rejuvenated Sunni Muslim Power which Saladin had
taken over and built up had moved the Crusaders to seek alternative
satisfaction for their cupidity at the expense of a less truculent victim.
The lead which the Normans had given by conquering East Roman
Italy (a.d. 1040-81) and going on to attack the broader East Roman
dominions east of the Adriatic (a.d. 1081-5 and 1185-91) had been
followed up by Richard Coeur-de-Lion when he had seized the East
Roman island of Cyprus in a.d. i 191, and by the captains of the Fourth
Crusade when they had allowed their course to be diverted from its
original objective in Syria to Constantinople in a.d. 1203. Mid-way
through the thirteenth century a French emperor was reigning at
Constantinople, a French marquis at Bodonitsa, a French duke at Athens,
and a French prince in the Morea, while there were few' Greek islands
in the Aegean that had not fallen into Italian hands. Yet these unseemly
conquests at a sister Christian society’s expense were not the chief
ground for hope in the minds of Western Crusaders of the generation of
St. Louis. They were less concerned to console themselves with Ortho¬
dox Christian spoils for reverses at Muslim hands than to retrieve these
reverses with the aid of Nestorian Christian allies.

The forgotten Nestorian Christendom of the Far East had dramati¬
cally appeared above the Western Crusaders’ eastern horizon in the

definitive military defeat by Saladin, their objective had been rcattained for them by
Frederick’* diplomacy on terns* which were guaranteed by the auspicious fact that on
this occasion they had been voluntarily conceded by the local Muslim Power. Jerusalem
was indeed soon wrested again out of Frankish hands by force of arms; but this time the
assailants were not the Terre d’Outre Mer’s AyyQbid neighbours but the remote
Khwarizmian wardens of Dir-al-Islam’s north-eastern march, who were hurled into the
AyyQbid ar.d Frankish dominions in Syria in a.d. 1243-4 by the irresistible impetus of
their headlong flight before the face of the pursuing Mongols.

1 This opportunity was particularly favourable for a Frankish barbarian invader,
since, after the successful defection of the Sanhaja Berbers of Western Kabylia from the
FStimids in a.d. 1043. Ifrikiyah had been devastated by the barbarian Nomad Arab
Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym, who had been unleashed against the Sanhaja by the Fati-
mids (see Gautier, E. F.: Let SUclts Obscun du Maghreb (Paris 1927, Payot), pp. 368-9).

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 355

train of the Mongol Eurasian Nomad world-conquerors. There were
Nestorian Uighur Turkish secretaries in the Mongols’ service who had
won their masters’ gratitude and confidence by meeting a sudden need
for clerks’ work which had arisen from the Mongols’ lightning-swift
acquisition of an oecumenical empire, 1 while on the other hand the
Muslims whom the Mongols had been subjugating in rapidly increasing
numbers since their invasion of the Khwarizm Shah’s dominions in
a.d. 1220 had fallen foul of pagan rulers whose regulations were irrecon¬
cilable with the ritual prescriptions of the SharVah 2 Might not the
Western Christians and the Far Eastern Christians manage, by a joint
effort, to convert the Mongols to Christianity and then enlist their
invincible converts in a common anti-Muslim crusade which would have
the finality of a war of annihilation ? The Mongols, as they had already
demonstrated, had the will and the power to commit ‘genocide’. How,
then, could the Muslims escape extermination if they were encircled by
ruthless Christian assailants attacking them simultaneously on a con¬
tinental as well as a maritime front ?

The seriousness with which these hopes were taken in a mid¬
thirteenth-century Western Christendom was indicated by the missions
to the Mongol Khaqan’s court at Qaraqorum on which Friar Giovanni
di Piano Carpini was dispatched by Pope Innocent IV in a.d. 1246 and
Friar William of Rubruck by Saint Louis in a.d. i253. J Yet this Christian
grand design for the extirpation of Islam proved to be a castle in the air.
The critical years in which the opportunity came and went were a.d.
1258-62. In a.d. 1258 the Mongols dealt Islam a stunning blow by taking
and sacking Baghdad and putting an end to the Baghdadi ‘Abbasid
Caliphate; in a.d. 1260 they crossed the Euphrates under a Nestorian
Christian commander and occupied Damascus, within not much more
than a hundred miles of the Western Crusaders’ still-surviving bridge¬
head at Acre. 4 At that moment the converging Christian forces were
within an ace of joining hands; 5 but the junction was never made, though
Mongol armies crossed the Euphrates once again, in a.d. 1281, 6 before
the Western bridgehead at Acre was pinched out by the Ayyubids’
Mamluk successors in a.d. 1291.

Meanwhile, the liquidation of the French conquests in the former
domain of the East Roman Empire, which had begun on the very morrow
of the Franco-Venctian sack of Constantinople in a.d. 1204, had suddenly
gathered momentum. In a.d. 1259 the GreekOrthodox Christian Emperor
of Nicaca, Michael Palaiologhos, had overthrown and captured Prince

* See II. ii. 238.

* Sec VI. vii. 257 and X. ix. 36. > See II. ii. 451.

* This is the approximate distance by the shortest of the several alternative practicable
routes, which runs (in the direction Acre-Damascus) via Ramah, Safad, and the Bridge
of Jacob’s Daughters spanning the Jordan between the Sea of Galilee and Lake Banyas,
whence it travels on to Damascus through Qunaytirah. This shortest route is an arduous
one, since it clambers over the southernmost spurs of both Lebanon and Antilebanon,
but the easiest alternative route—running south-eastward from Acre through the Vale
of Esdraelon, crossing the Jordan below the Sea of Galilee instead of above it, and then
turning north-north-eastward—is about half as long again. A description of these and
other alternative routes between Acre and Damascus is given by Sir George Adam
Smith in The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (London 1904, Hodder and
Stoughton), pp. 426-8.

* See Ii. ii. 238 and 451, and p. 222, above.

6 See I. i. 3S o.

356 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
William II of the Morea at the Battle of Pclagonia; in a.d. 1261 he
evicted the French from Constantinople; and in a.d. 1262 he extorted
from his Moreot French captive the cession of three fortresses in the
Morea' as the price of his release. In thus progressively driving the
French out of the territories that they had stolen from the East Roman
Empire in the Balkan Peninsula, the Nicaean Greek Orthodox Christians
were working, not for themselves, but for their more effective Ottoman
Turkish Muslim successors. 2 Michael Palaioldghos, the Nicaean con¬
queror of Constantinople, was the forerunner of her subsequent Brusan
conqueror Mehmed FStih; and the Greek Orthodox Christian dynasty
of which Michael was the founder spent a considerable part of its con¬
stantly dwindling resources for 170 years (a.d. 1262-1432) out of its 194
years-long tenure of power (a.d. 1259-1453) in doggedly reconquering
the Morea, foot by foot, from its interloping Western Christian masters.
The din of arms clashing in this parochial inter-Christian strife echoed
so loudly from the flanks of Mount Erymanthus that both the bands of
Moreot Christian combatants were deaf to the thunder of an Ottoman
battle-axe staving in the gates of the Hexamfli. The reconquest of the
Morea was completed by Constantine Dhrdghasis as Greek prince of the
Morea in a.d. 1432, twenty-one years before he died in Constantinople
at Saint Romanus’s Gate as the last of the East Roman Emperors. As
both prince and emperor, he had served in effect as the Padishah’s
bailiff, and the Ottoman conqueror duly followed up his occupation of
Constantinople by taking over a reconquered Morea from a slaughtered
Constantine’s brothers Thomas and Demetrius in a.d. 1460.

Thus, of all the territorial gains at the expense of Dar-al-Islam and
Romania that the Western Crusaders had made in the basin of the
Mediterranean from- the eleventh century to the thirteenth, the only
substantial portions that remained in Western hands at the close of the
fifteenth century were Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, and Andalusia. These
exiguous fruits of such arduous labour were, however, supplemented by
some eleventh-hour acquisitions on a Russian Orthodox Christian front.
The crusading energies that had been diverted at the turn of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries from Syria to Romania, as an easier option than
a front on which the adversary to be faced was now the redoubtable
Ayyubid Power, were soon re-diverted again from a Romania whose
native Greek Orthodox Christians had been stung by the outrage of
a.d. 1204 into a desperate resistance culminating in a spirited counter¬
attack. As the Crusaders’ conquests in Romania melted away in their
turn, the Western Christian military adventurers began to despair of
an indomitable Mediterranean and to seek fairer fortunes in a more
amenable Baltic.

The Teutonic Knights, who decamped at the turn of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries from Syria to the Vistula via Transylvania, 3
carved out a new Baltic domain for themselves at the expense of pagan
Prussians, Letts, and Ests; but the main effect of their operations in this
East European theatre was indirect. They made little headway against
cither their pagan Lithuanian or their Western Christian Polish neigh-
1 Moncmvaala, Maina (Mani), Miami. * See III. iii. 27. * See II. ii. 172.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 357

bours, but the military prowess which they unintentionally inspired in
these intended victims of theirs, by forcing them to fight for their lives,
found an outlet in the fourteenth century in extensive Polish and
Lithuanian conquests at the expense of a Russian Orthodox Christendom
which had fallen into disunity in the twelfth century and had been
ground to powder by the impact of the Mongols in the thirteenth. 1 This
Western Christian encroachment on a Russian Orthodox Christendom’s
domain survived, as we have seen, 2 into the Modern Age of Western
history after the liquidation of all the Medieval Western Christian con¬
quests east of the Ionian Islands in a Greek Orthodox Christendom.

If we ask ourselves why it was that a Medieval Western Christendom’s
lasting gains of territory from the Crusades amounted only to such dis¬
proportionately small returns for so gigantic an expenditure of effort, we
shall find more than one answer to our question.

One obvious explanation of the ultimate defeat of the Crusades lies
in the excessive dispersion of the Western aggressors’ energies. They
attacked their neighbours on no less than five fronts—in the Iberian
Peninsula, in South Italy, in the Balkan Peninsula, in Syria, and in the
Continental European borderland between Western Christendom and
Russia—and it is not surprising that they should have failed to obtain
any decisive results from this improvident use of a limited fund of sur¬
plus Western energy which might have carried their offensive forward
to some permanently tenable ‘natural frontier’ if it had been concen¬
trated steadily on any single front out of the five.

If the French Crusaders, for example, had concentrated their efforts on
reinforcing an Iberian front that lay at France’s doors, Western Christen¬
dom might have reached the natural frontier of the Sahara, not in the
twentieth century, but in the thirteenth, instead of halting for a quarter
of a millennium—from the fifth decade of the thirteenth century to
a.d. 1492 —at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and then for more than
four centuries thereafter at the Straits of Gibraltar, which in all previous
ages had been a bridge and not a barrier between the Iberian Peninsula
and the Maghrib. The impetus of Western Christian aggression against
the Maghrib! province of Dar-al-Isl 5 m was weakened by the division of
Western Christian forces between an Iberian and an Apulian front; yet,
even so, if the Normans who headed for Apulia instead of Lc6n had
concentrated thenceforward on this single new enterprise, they might
perhaps still have reached a Saharan natural frontier on this Central
Mediterranean front likewise, via Sicily and Tunisia. Instead, they
dispersed their energies once again by invading the Transadriatic
dominions of the East Roman Empire in a.d. 1081 before they had com¬
pleted their conquest of Sicily, and then riding off on the First Crusade
to carve out a Syrian principality for themselves round Antioch. 3

I See II. ii. 172-3. «nd p. 399, below. * On p. 126, above.

J The fantastically far-flung enterprise in Asia, in which Bohemond indulged in A.D.
1097, had been anticipated in a.d. 1073-4 by a compatriot of his sumanted Russell, who
had attempted to take advantage of the crushing defeat of the East Romans by the
Saljuqs at Mclazkerd (Manrikert) in a.d. 1071 in order to carve out a Norman prin¬
cipality in the East Roman Empire’s Armeniac army-corps district in North-Eastern
Anatolia (sec further, p. 389, n. 1, below).

358 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Thereafter, when the Normans did tardily embark on the conquest of
Ifrlqlyah in a.d. i 134, they allowed themselves to be diverted from carry¬
ing this African enterprise through to completion by being drawn into a
great war with the East Roman Empire (gerebatur a.d. i 147-5 6 ) which
was as exhausting as it was inconclusive.

The Levantine front that was opened up in the First Crusade had to
compete with the demands of the already active fronts in the Central
and the Western Mediterranean, yet the residue of Western Christian
military effort that could be mobilized for action in Syria might still
perhaps have sufficed to establish a tenable frontier in this distant
theatre of operations if the Crusaders had been prudent enough to re¬
frain from straying across the Euphrates and resolute enough to push
forward to the fringe of the North Arabian Steppe all along the line
from the right bank of the Euphrates to the head of the Gulf of ‘Aqabah.
They did succeed in reaching this natural frontier at its southern end,
and thereby momentarily insulating Cairo from Damascus, and Mecca
from both, by planting outposts of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at Aylah
and Karak; 1 but these strategically momentous acquisitions remained as
precarious as they were provocative so long as the left flank of the Western
intruders’ Transjordanian salient remained open to counter-attack from
Dar-al-Islam’s vast unconquercd Asiatic interior. This deadly gap in
the defences of the Terre d’Outre Mer could have been closed at the
outset by the leaders of the First Crusade if, instead of crossing the
Euphrates to seize an untenable Edessa, they had expended an equal
amount of energy on occupying the key position of Aleppo between
Antioch and the Syrian bank of the Euphrates and on securing all the
crossings of the Euphrates between the southern spurs of the Antitaurus
and the northern fringe of the North Arabian Steppe; for, had they thus
sealed Syria off at the northern end, as they afterwards duly sealed it off
at the southern end by occupying Karak and ‘Aqabah, they could then
have reduced Hamah, Homs, and Damascus at their leisure; and this
strategy would have driven between a Sunni Muslim Caliphate in ‘Iraq
and a Shl’I Muslim Anticaliphate in Egypt a wedge of Frankish territory
that might have been proof against any Muslim blow that could have
been struck at it from either side.

In the event, the Crusaders’ neglect of the natural frontier offered by
the elbow of the Euphrates 2 was to deliver them into the hands of a re-

» In pushing inland from the southern end of the Shephelah across the Negeb to¬
wards the Red Sea, the Crusaders were following in the tracks of the Cherethites and
anticipating the strategy of the Zionists (sec VI. vii. 102, n. 1, and p. 309, above). In
building their Transjordanian castle at Karak, they were establishing themselves astride
an historic ‘King’s Highway' which had latterly become the main pilgrimage-road to
Mecca from the Asiatic provinces of Dir-al-Islim (see VI. vii. 101-2).

1 The fecklessness of the Crusaders in neglecting this natural line of defence stands
out in glaring contrast to the prudence shown by their Mamlilk successors and their
Roman predecessors in profiting by it. Along the line of the Middle Euphrates the
MamlQks held at bay a Mongol Empire which extended across the Continent from the
Euphrates to the Pacific at the time when the Mamltiks made the river into the moat of
their ‘Fortress Egypt’. In the long history of the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire,
Pompey’s prudence in 64 b.c. in making the Middle Euphrates the limit of his new
Roman province of Syria was vindicated by the disaster that overtook Crassus at Carrhae
in 54 B.C. and by the difficulties in which Trajan involved himself in a.d. 114-17 (see
Lepper, F. A.: Trajan'1 Parthian War (London 1948, Cumbcrlegc), pp. 95-96) when

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 359
juvenated Sunni Muslim Power which the challenge of the Crusades
called into existence. This new Power’s first base of operations was Triq,
whose irrigation-system, which was the source of its agricultural pro¬
ductivity, had not yet been wrecked by Mongol barbarian invaders ; 1
and the first in the scries of warrior-statesmen who built this Power up
was Zcngl {dominabatur a . d . 1127-46), who was appointed in a . d . 1127
by the Saljuq Imperial Government to be atJbeg (count) of the metro¬
politan province of a shrunken 'Abbasid Caliphate which the Saljuqs
had liberated from the domination of the Shl'i Buwayhids in a . d . 1055. 2
Within a year of his installation at Baghdad, Zengl won for himself
a dominion of his own by annexing Mosul and the Ja2irah; and he
immediately followed up these conquests on the east side of the Euphrates
by crossing the river and releasing the stalwart outpost city of Aleppo
from its encirclement by the Frankish principalities of Edessa and
Antioch. Edessa, now encircled in its turn, fell to Zengl in a . d . 1144;
Zengl’s son and successor Nur-ad-Din (dominabatur a . d . 1146-74) was
able to hold his ground west of the Euphrates against the Second
Crusade (gerebatur a . d . 1146-9), and Nur-ad-Din’s subsequent annexa¬
tion of Damascus in a.d. 1154 provided his lieutenant Shlrkuh and
Shirkuh’s nephew, colleague, and successor Saladin with a base of

B ions for breaking through the screen of Frankish outposts between
and *Aqabah in order to compete with Amalric King of Jerusalem
for the conquest of Egypt from a decrepit Fatimid Shl'i regime.

Three successive pairs of rival expeditions (gesta a.d. 1163-4, 1167,
1168-9) ended in Egypt’s remaining in Saladin’s hands. The Western
intruders’ Terre d'Outre Mer then found itself enveloped by its Sunni
Muslim adversaries, and this encirclement spelled the doom of the
Frankish Power in Syria; but Saladin was too good a strategist to strike
before he had consolidated his now commanding position. In a.d. 1171
he extinguished the Fatimid Anticaliphate and restored de jure the
sovereignty of an 'Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad over an Egypt whose
resources were at Saladin’s own disposal de facto. Thereafter he rounded
off his empire by first annexing Tripolitania, the Eastern Sudan, and the
Yaman (a.d. i 172-4) and then, after the death of his overlord Nur-ad-
Dln, making himself master of everything between the eastern borders
of the Frankish principalities in Syria and the western foothills of the
Zagros in Kurdistan (a.d. 1174-86).* When he struck at the Franks at
last in a.d. 1187 the result was a foregone conclusion. The Third
Crusade could not save the Terre d’Outre Mer from being reduced to
a few bridgeheads along the Syrian coast.

he attempted to move the frontier forward perhaps as far as to the head of the Persian
Gulf. No permanent annexation of Asiatic territory east of the Euphrates was made by
the Roman Imperial Government till a.d. 194-9. when the Parthian Power was in
extremis, and on this occasion the frontier was moved forward no farther than to the line
of the Euphrates’ eastern tributary the Khabur.

1 For the coup degrdee which the Mongols dealt to the Syriac Civilization by wrecking
the irrigation-system of 'Iraq in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era, see IV, iv.

43 * See I. i. 356.

J Saladin conquered Eastern Syria, south of Aleppo, in a.d. 1174; established his
suzerainty over Aleppo in A.D. 1176; conquered the Jazirah and annexed Aleppo in a.d.
1182-3; and established his suzerainty over Mosul in a.d. 1186.

360 encounters between contemporaries

The characteristically short-sighted counter-movc of the leaders of
the Fourth Crusade to Saladin’s conclusive defeat of the Third Crusade
in Syria was, as we have seen, to commit a now hard-pressed Western
Christendom to yet a fourth Mediterranean front in the domain of the
East Roman Empire; and here the disastrous effects of the Western
aggressors’ persistent dispersion of their energies made themselves felt
more signally and more swiftly than in any other theatre. A Frankish host
that was strong enough to deal the East Roman Empire an irretrievable
blow by storming and sacking its sacrosanct and hitherto impregnable
capital had not the strength to seize more than a handful of the fragments
into which the shattered empire broke up, and even these meagre pick¬
ings slipped, one by one, out of the covetous Frankish hand that had
clutched them. A Monferratine ‘Kingdom of Salonica’ lasted no longer
than eighteen years ( a . d . 1204-22), and a French ‘empire’ at Constan¬
tinople no longer than fifty-seven (a.d. 1204-61), while the French
Principality of the Morea melted away less rapidly, but not less in¬
exorably, from a . d . 1262 onwards. 1 The Italian city-states alone showed
a capacity for retaining and increasing their share of the spoils that the
Fourth Crusade had picked up from the wreckage of a wantonly shattered
East Roman Empire.

A second explanation of the failure of the Crusades is to be found in
the disappointment of the Crusaders’ fond hope that a heaven-sent
‘Prester John’ would miraculously redress in Christendom’s favour a
balance which Saladin’s geniu3 had inclined so heavily to the advantage
of the Crusaders’ Muslim adversaries. In the event, the Mongol world-
conquerors did not become converts to a Christianity of either the Roman
or the Nestorian persuasion. The Roman Catholic archbishopric that
was founded in a.d. 1294 by John of Montccorvino in the Mongol
KhSqans’ southern capital at Khanbalyq (Peking), 1 on the inner side
of the Great Wall, expired in the course of the fourteenth century 3 as
obscurely as the Norse settlements in Grccnland.The prize of converting
the last still pagan Eurasian Nomads was eventually divided between
Islam and the Tantric Mahayanian Buddhism of Tibet, 4 and in the
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries Islam found other new
worlds besides to conquer in Yunnan, the Deccan, Indonesia, the Sudan,
Western Anatolia, and Rumelia.

The event thus exposed the vanity of a thirteenth-century Western
Christian dream that Islam might be stamped out by an enveloping
centripetal reflux of the western and eastern arcs of a Christian wave
which had previously been receding centrifugally in all directions under
the pressure of a following Islamic wave’s advance. 3 The visionary

1 See p. 356, above.

* See Moule, A. C.: Christians in Chinabtfort the Year 1550 (London 1930, S.P.C.K.),
p. 172 . For Qubiliy’s transfer of the Mongol imperial capital to Peking from Qaraqorum,
see II. ii. 121.

3 See Moule, op. cit., p. 107. The last archbishop of this see, which had been moved
from Khanbalyq to Zaitun (Ch’Oan-chou, near Amoy), was murdered somewhere in
Central Asia in a.d. 1362. _ _ * Sec pp. 218-19 and p. 337, n. 1, above.

3 The succession of concentric waves in which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam spread
over the face of the World, one after another, from an identical centre of dispersion in a
'Greater Syria’ embracing Palestine and the Hijaz has been noticed in II. ii. 234-5 and
285-8, and is depicted in xi, map 6.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 361
thirteenth-century Western observers who had dreamed this dream had
not been mistaken in their intuition that, in the domain of Islam on
which the Crusaders were trespassing, a mighty institution was passing
away; their mistake had lain in identifying this moribund institution with
the religion that had been revealed to Mankind through the Prophet
Muhammad. The institution that was actually in extremis in the thirteenth
century of the Christian Era was a Syriac Civilization whose disintegra¬
tion had been retarded by an intrusion of Hellenism and whose universal
state, originally embodied in the Achacmcnian Empire, had been re¬
established by Muslim Arab empire-builders a thousand years after the
destruction of the Achaemenian Empire by Alexander the Great.

Islam might indeed have died out if it had never outgrown its original
function of providing a distinctive heretical religious badge for Arab
war-bands that had accidentally reconstituted a Syriac universal state in
the shape of the Caliphate as a by-product of the barbarian successor-
state that they had been bent on carving out of the Roman Empire. 1 It
would in fact have died out if the Umayyads, like their Visigothic con¬
temporaries and victims, 1 had elected to abandon their distinctive bar¬
barian heresy in favour of their Christian subjects’ orthodoxy. In that
event the ci-devant Muslim Umayyad Arab conquerors of Syria would
have become converts to the Monophysite form of Christianity, like
their predecessors the ci-devant pagan Ghassanid Arab wardens of the
Roman Empire’s Syrian desert marches. 3 This possibility had passed
away when the replacement of the Umayyad dynasty by the ‘Abbasids
had transferred the ascendancy in the Caliphate from the Arabs to their
Khurasan! clients and had substituted the profession of Islam for the
possession of an Arab pedigree as the qualification for membership in
a dominant minority. From that time onwards the spiritual gifts and
intellectual abilities of all peoples in a politically reunited Syriac World
had contributed to build Islam up into an oecumenical higher religion
which could compete with Christianity on the strength of the elements
that it had borrowed from it; and, in the next and last chapter of Syriac
history, this enriched Islam had begun to make mass-conversions among
a now' dissolving Caliphate’s Christian and Zoroastrian subjects, not
only by virtue of its intrinsic spiritual merits, but for the sake of the
enduring social order which Islam promised to provide for a world that
was appalled at the prospect of losing the oecumenical framework which
had hitherto been provided for it by the political institution of the
Caliphate. 4

The future of Islam had thus been assured before an already tottering
Baghdadi ‘Abbasid Caliphate finally succumbed to a coup de grdee from
the Mongols. So far from threatening Islam with destruction, the invasions
of the Caliphate’s derelict domain by the Crusaders from one side and
by the Mongols from the other were the finishing touches in the making
of Islam’s fortune; for, when the Baghdadi ‘Abbasid Caliphate foundered,
and all that was left of the old fabric of the Syriac Society went dow-n
with it, Islam did not die, but lived on to offer refuge to the shipwrecked

« See V. v. 127-8, 230, and 672-8. * See p. 280, n. 3, above.

J See ibid. * See V. v. 678; VII. vii. 398-400; and xi, maps 38 and 39.

362 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
children of a lost civilization. Islam not only captivated the savage
Mongol conquerors of the Caliphate; she served as a chrysalis for
bringing to birth two new societies to take the place of a Syriac Society
that had finally dissolved in the post-‘Abbasid interregnum; and the
emergence of the Iranic and Arabic Muslim civilizations set the seal on
the discomfiture of the Western Christian Crusaders.

In the first place these nascent societies, in the vigour of their early
youth, created war machines with which the Crusaders could not com-

K e. In another context 1 we have taken note of the overthrow of Saint
uis’ disorderly knights by a trained and disciplined Egyptian Mamluk
cavalry at Mansurah in a . d . 1250. 2 The still better trained and disci¬
plined Ottoman Janissary infantry, which overthrew the Mamluks in
a . d . 1516-17, 3 had the upper hand over their Western Christian adver¬
saries from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth, when their military
ascendancy was tardily wrested from them by Western troops who
conquered them by at last successfully imitating them. 4 But sheer
military superiority was not the whole explanation of the two new-born
Islamic civilizations’ triumph over the West; for the Iranic Muslim
Civilization, at any rate, gained the day by its superior attractiveness
as much as by its superior strength. When, in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, Greek Orthodox Christians who could no longer look forward
to remaining their own masters found themselves still free to choose
between a Frankish and an Ottoman domination, they opted for the
‘Osmanlis; 5 and a minority among them that was willing to contract out
of an onerous political servitude by abandoning a traditional religious
allegiance showed less repugnance towards becoming converts to Islam
than towards staying within the Christian fold at the price of becoming
ecclesiastical subjects of the Pope. While the Greeks’ historic choice was
partly determined by the negative motive of resentment at the over¬
bearing behaviour by which tne Franks had made themselves odious in
Greek eyes, some credit must also be given to the positive attraction
exerted by the Ottoman way of life, in view of the significant fact that,
in the golden age of Ottoman history, the Christian renegades who
‘turned Turk’ were not exclusively Orthodox Christians who had found
themselves caught between an Ottoman and a Frankish mill-stone, but
were also recruited from among Western Christians who were not under
any corresponding pressure to change their religious allegiance against
their inclinations.

In spite of the strength and attractiveness of the 'Osmanlis, the Franks
might perhaps have retained permanent possession of at least a remnant
of their acquisitions in the former domain of the East Roman Empire
if the late Medieval Western cosmos of city-states, of which the North
and Central Italian city-states were the foremost representatives, had
succeeded in assimilating to itself the relatively backward feudal mass of
a Medieval Western Christian body social. The Italians were condemned
by an inexorable fiat of geography to live and move and have their being
in the Mediterranean; they had invested heavily in commerce and

1 Sec IV. iv. 431-65.
1 Sec IV. iv. 450-2.

J See IV. iv. 448-p.

* See pp. 151-2, above.

4 See III. iii. 31-47.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 363
sovereignty in the Levant; and, though they were at least as unpopular
as the French, Catalan, and Navarrese Franks among Orthodox Christ¬
ians who could not avoid encountering them, they were at any rate more
efficient than their Transalpine and Transmarine coreligionists—as was
demonstrated by the accumulation in Venetian, Genoese, and Florentine
hands of an ever increasing proportion of the constantly diminishing
Frankish assets in the Levant in the course of the thirteenth, fourteenth,
and fifteenth centuries.'

If the Italian city-states had been backed by a Western World m
which their own order of society had prevailed, they might perhaps have
proved strong enough, with this solid support in their rear, to save the
situation for Western Christendom on its Mediterranean front; but, as
we have noticed in another context, 2 the ninth decade of the fourteenth
century saw the end of any prospect that the Western World as a whole
might find its way to modernization through a mass-conversion to the
city-state dispensation which had made the fortunes of the precociously
modern Italians and Flemings. In the event, the feudal mass of a Medieval
Western Christendom modernized itself, not by reminting its kingdoms
into city-states, but by adapting to the kingdom-state scale of political
operations* the efficient administrative apparatus which late medieval
North Italian despots had imported from the East Roman Empire via its
Sicilian successor-state; 4 and the Modern Western World that was
actually called into existence crystalized, not round the Mediterranean
city-states of Italy, but round the Atlantic kingdoms and common¬
wealths of Portugal, Spain, France, England, and Holland. A Venice,
Genoa, and Florence that had thus lost their lead within their native
Western Christendom had, a fortiori, lost their chance of heading a
united Western resistance to the progress of the ‘Osmanlis in the Levant,
while the Atlantic countries that had won the lead and acquired the
power were too eagerly preoccupied with the conquest of the Ocean to
be willing to spend much energy on stemming the ‘Osmanlis’ advance
in a Mediterranean that had dwindled into being a backwater.

These considerations, between them, perhaps go some way towards
accounting for the Crusaders’ eventual failure. Our findings may be
summed up in the verdict that the Medieval Western Christian com¬
petitors for dominion over the Mediterranean Basin were neither strong
enough to subdue their neighbours nor cultivated enough to captivate
them. The second of these two judgements needs to be tested further by
noticing what the Medieval Western Christians and their neighbours
thought and felt about one another, and what, if any, cultural commerce
was transacted between them.

2. The Medieval West and the Syriac World 5
When the Medieval Western Christians launched their assault on the
Syriac World in the eleventh century of the Christian Era, they found
its inhabitants divided in their communal allegiance between Islam and
I See III. iii. 347, n. I, and pp. 168-70 and 177-8, above. 2 See III. iii. 347~5°*

3 Sec III. iii. 300-1, 30c, and 357-63; IV. iv. 198-200; and p. 395, below.

« Sec III. iii. 354-6; IV. iv. 198; Vfi. vii. 537-8; and p. 395, below,
s Sec xi, map 41.

364 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the divers ecclesiastical communities that had occupied, between them,
the stage of Syriac history before the Primitive Muslim Arabs had
liquidated the Roman Empire south of the Taurus and had united
politically under their own rule all Cis-Tauran Syriac territories, from
the Pamirs to the Iberian Peninsula, that had been under Achaemcnian
and Carthaginian sovereignty at the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries
b.c. 1 The relations established by the Western Christian Crusaders with
surviving pre-Muslim Syriac communities with which they came into
contact were more intimate than their relations with their Muslim con¬
temporaries; and we may infer that the Crusades might have had longer
abiding cultural effects of greater historical importance supposing that
these Medieval Western wars of aggression had been waged in an earlier
age in which the pre-Muslim communities had, all told, still embraced
an overwhelming majority of the constituents of the Syriac Society.

In the seventh century of the Christian Era—at the moment when
the Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors had burst out of the Arabian
Peninsula—Syria, Egypt, and Armenia had been predominantly Mono-
physite, ‘Iraq predominantly Nestorian, the Iranian Plateau predomi¬
nantly Zoroastrian, the Oxus-Jaxartcs Basin predominantly Mahayanian
Buddhist, and North-West Africa and the Iberian Peninsula predomi¬
nantly Western Catholic Christian, though some of these competing
religious communities had been gaining ground at their neighbours’
expense. The Monophysites, for example, had not only reduced the
Catholic Christians in Egypt and Syria to a mere minority of ‘Melchites’
who owed their survival there to the official support of the Roman
Imperial Government, but had also been encroaching on the Nestorians’
domain east of the Khabur and the Euphrates, 3 while the Nestorians,

1 The reintegration of a pre-AIexandrine Achaemenian Empire in a post-Roman Arab
Caliphate has been noticed in I. i. 76 - 77 *

* Between a.d. 457 and a.d. 486 a Nestorian Christianity which had been declared
heretical by the Catholic Church at the Council of Ephesus in a.d. 431 succeeded in
capturing the Christian Church in the Sasanian Empire (sec O’Leary, dc L.: How
Greek Science Passed to the Arabs (London 1948, Kegan Paul), pp. 58-59), thanks to its
enjoyment of two advantages. Its official proscription in the Roman Empire certified
its political innocuousness from the standpoint of the Sasanian Imperial Government,
while the community of language between the Syriac-speaking Nestorian Christian
refugees from the Roman dominions in Mesopotamia and Syria and the Syriac-speaking
population of the Sasanian dominions in 'Iriq gave the Nestorians an easy entry into
this important mission-field. The same two advantages were, however, enjoyed by the
Syriac-speaking Monophysites, in their turn, after their doctrine had been declared
heretical at the Council of Calchedon in A.p. 451; and, in the seoucl, they, too, succeeded
in forcing an entry’ into the Sasanian Empire at the Nestorians’ heels. Beth Arsham, on
the threshold of the Nestorian Catholicos’a sec of Selcucia-on-Tigris, had a Mono-
phyaitc bishop, Shc'mon, circa, a.d. 503-48 (O’Leary, op. cit., p. 88). Adiabene was won
for Monophysitism by Ahudemmeh, who was Bishop of Takrir, circa a.d. 559-75
(O'Leary, op. cit., pp. 90-91); and from a.d. 640 onwards the Monophysite Church in
the ex-Sasanian dominions, then in process of being conquered by the Primitive Muslim
Arabs, provided itself with a supreme pontiff entitled ‘maphrian’ (ibid., p. 91). On the
other hand, when the Lakhmid Arab warden of the Sasanian Empire’s anti-Roman
marches, Nu'man V, was converted from paganism to Christianity towards the close of
the sixth century of the Christian Era, he adopted, not Monophysitism, but the Nes¬
torian faith of the Syriac-speaking sedentary population of his capital city, Hirah (ibid.,
pp. 67-68 and 184-5)* In making this choice, Nu'man may have been influenced by
the consideration that the rival Ghassflnid wardens of the Roman Empire’s anti-Sasanian
marches had opted for Monophysitism in a.d. J43, when the Ghassanid prince Harith
b. Jabalah had obtained, through the offices of the Empress Theodora, the appointment
of a Monophysite bishop to the see of Bostra (ibid., p. 86).

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 365
for their part, had been gaining ground at the Zoroastrians’ expense on
the Iranian Plateau, and the Zoroastrians at the Buddhists’ expense in
the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin.

The sudden and rapid conquest of these vast territories by the Primi¬
tive Muslim Arabs had not at first made any appreciable difference to
the religious and cultural complexion of the Syriac World. Islam had
appeared on the scene as the distinctive religion of a handful of bar¬
barian invaders; 1 and, even when an ‘Abbasid had been substituted
for an Ummayad regime as a result of the overthrow of the Umayyad
Dynasty’s Syrian Arab war-bands by Khur 5 sanl Iranian marchmen
converts to Islam, the effect had been merely to replace one dominant
minority by another. 2 A widespread conversion to Islam of the subject
populations of the Caliphate, beyond the circle of the dominant minor¬
ity’s slaves, freedmen, and clients, apparently did not begin until after
the ‘Abbasid Caliphate had been smitten in the reign of Mu'tasim
(imperabat a.d. 833-42) by the first of the successive strokes that
punctuated its long-drawn-out death-agony, and this propagation of
Islam did not gather momentum until, in the eleventh century of
the Christian Era, the ‘Abbasids’ derelict dominions were invaded
simultaneously by Saljuq Turkish Eurasian Nomad barbarians over¬
land from the east and by Frankish barbarians overseas from Western
Christendom.

During a social interregnum in which the Syriac Society was in dis¬
solution while its daughter societies, the Arabic and Iranic Muslim
civilizations, were still unborn, the non-Muslim populations that had
been living since the seventh century of the Christian Era under an
Islamic Caliphate’s political aegis were being drawn towards a spon¬
taneous conversion to Islam by a hope of finding in the solidarity of
a common religious allegiance a social framework that would be more
durable than the universal state whose once imposing structure was now
falling about their ears, and at the same time they were being pushed
forcibly along the same road by pressure—bursting out into increasingly
frequent bouts of persecution—from a Muslim dominant minority that
had been stung, by the humiliating and disquieting spectacle of bar¬
barians overrunning Dar-al-Islam, into abandoning the toleration that
it had been accustomed to extend, not only to the scripturally accredited
‘People of the Book’, but also by analogy to other cultivated non-Muslim
communities such as the Zoroastrians, the Hindus, and even the HarrSnl
devotees of an elsewhere extinct Hcllcno-Babylonic paganism. 3 In a
crisis in which a Frankish and a Eurasian Nomad barbarian aggressor
eventually all but joined hands in Syria for the purpose of dealing

' Sec III. iii. 277; V. v. 230 and 676; and p. 10, n. 1, above,
a See VI. vii. 140-1 and 329 .

* For the customary Islamic liberality in extending to the adherents of all higher
religions the toleration accorded in the Qur’Sn to ‘the People of the Book', see IV. iv.
225-6 and V. v. 674, n. 2. For the fossil of the Babylonic Civilisation that survived at
HarrSn down to the post-Syriac social interregnum, sec IV. iv. 101, n. 1; y. v. 125,
n. 1; and Scton Lloyd: 'Recent Survey of Remains at Harran’, in The Times, 21st
March, 1951, and 29th January, 1952. The part played by the Harranis in the self-
Hellcniution of the Syriac World in the ‘Abbasid Age ts noticed in the present Study on
p. 408, n. 5, below.

366 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

Islam its death-blow, 1 Muslim public opinion became impatient of un¬
converted Unbelievers in the Muslim community’s midst.

Owing to this conjunction of psychological and social circumstances,
the Monophysite, Nestorian, and Zoroastrian communities in Dar-al-
Islam suffered, in the course of some three centuries ending circa a.d.
1275, the fate which had overtaken the ‘Melchite’ Catholic community
in the Roman dominions south of the Taurus in the course of the two
centuries between the convocation of the Council of Calchcdon in a.d.
451 and the Arab conquest. In that earlier age of Syriac history a Catholic
Christian community which had previously embraced almost the entire
population of Syria and Egypt had dwindled into a minority as a result
of a mass-secession to Monophysitism. Some four hundred years later
the Monophysites and the other pre-Muslim ecclesiastical communities
in the vast area that had been united politically in the meantime by the
prowess of Muslim Arab conquerors were reduced in their turn, by
mass-conversions to Islam, from being local majorities of the population
of the now derelict domain of the Caliphate to being mere residual
minorities like the ‘Melchites’. As for Buddhism in the Oxus-Jaxartcs
Basin and Western Catholic Christianity in the Maghrib, they both
disappeared altogether from regions which had once played a leading
part in the lives of the Mahayana and of the Western Christian Church,
and it may be conjectured that Western Christianity would have had the
same fate in Andalusia as in the Maghrib if its extinction there had
not been forestalled by the Western Christian transfrontier barbarians’
victory over the rival Muslim barbarians from the Sahara and the Atlas
in their contest for possession of the spoils of the Andalusian Umayyad
Caliphate; for, during the five centuries of Muslim ascendancy in the
Peninsula, the backward native provincial Christians had shown them¬
selves highly susceptible to the attractions of their Arab Muslim masters’
superior Syriac culture. 1

* Sec pp. 354-5. above.

* In the Islamic community in Andalusia the descendants of native Iberian converts
(muti'alladun) probably far outnumbered the descendants of Berber, and a fortiori those
of Arab, immigrants. There were mass-conversions on the morrow of the conquest, and
the Muslims of Saragossa and Toledo, in particular, appear to have been mostly of
native origin (Livy-Provencal, E.: Hitloire de L'Espogne Musulmane . vol. i (Cairo 1944,
Institut Francais d'Arch^ologie Orientate du Caire), pp. 53 and hi). There were even
converts to Islam who came not from the subject population but from the independent
Iberian Christian principalities. The Banu Qasi of Tudela, whose representative Musa
b. MOs§ seized Barcelona in a.d. 856 (ibid., p. 220), were a converted Aragonese Gothic
family (ibid., pp. 100-10) who had Basque kinsmen and allies (ibid., pp. 151-2), and the
native origin of the family was proclaimed in the names of two of this Musa's four sons,
Lope and Fortun, while the names of the other two, Mutarrif and Iamk'il, were tributes
to the family’s conversion (ibid., p. 226). The rebel 'Abd-ar-RahmJn b. al-Jilliqi (‘the
Galician’s son'), who ruled an independent principality at Badajoz, in defiance of
Cordova, circa a.d. 875-930 (ibid., pp. 207-10 and 299), was manifestly likewise a
Christian convert from beyond the border. The subject Christian origin of some of the
leading Muslim families in Andalusia was similarly recorded in their family names: e.g
th: Banu Angelino and Banu Sabarico of Seville, and the Banu’l-Longo, Banu Qabturus,
and Ibn-al-Qutiyah (‘son of the Goth’) (ibid., p. 54). One of the rebels with whom
'Abd-ar-RahmSn had to contend, Muhammad b. Ardabulish (ibid., p. 287), advertised
in his father’s Sarmatian Christian name ‘Ardaburius’ his family’s descent from one of
the pre-Visigothic Alan barbarian invaders of the Peninsula who must have stayed
behind when the main body of his fellow tribesmen had crossed to Africa with their
Vandal comrades. Though the Banu Hajjaj of Seville did not proclaim their Christian
origin in their nomenclature, they are thought by Ldvy-Provenf&l (ibid., pp. 251-2)

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 367
Thus, at the very time when the Western Christian Crusaders were
establishing their ephemeral foothold on the Mediterranean fringes of
the African and Asiatic domains of a moribund Syriac Society, the non-
Muslim communities in the Syriac World were being confronted with
a choice between conversion to Islam and persistent loyalty to their
traditional religious allegiances at the enhanced price of an isolation and
a persecution which they had not previously been called upon to endure.
In these untoward circumstances the majority embraced Islam, and the
prc-Islamic ecclesiastical communities of the Syriac World became
almost extinct save for a few ‘fossils in fastnesses’: the Zoroastrians
in the oases of Ya2d and Kirman; the Nestorian Christians in the
highlands of the Zagros; the Syriac-speaking ‘Jacobite’ Monophysitc
Christians in the highlands of the Tur'Abdln; the Armenian ‘Gregorian’
Monophysite Christians in the highlands between the Cappadocian
Plateau and the lowlands of Cilicia and Commagcne; 1 the Maronite
Monothelete Christians in the Lebanon; the Coptic Monophysite
Christians in Upper Egypt, Nubia, and Abyssinia. Of these hardy
survivors of a prc-Islamic age of Syriac history, only the Armenians and
the Maronites came into direct contact with the Western Christian
Crusaders, and both these communities were as strongly attracted by the
Medieval Western Christian culture as the Medieval Western Christian
subjects of a Muslim ‘ascendancy’ in Andalusia were attracted by the
Syriac culture of their Arab conquerors.

to have been descended from Goths who had taken sides with Tflriq b. Ziy&d in A.D.
711. Abu 'Amir Al-Mansur’s second successor in the Cordovan dictatorship, ‘Abd-ar-
RahmSn, was surnamed Sanchuelo (ibid., p. 469).

The Iberian subjects of the Arab rulers of Cordova who did not adopt their masters’
religion were nevertheless apt, like the converts, to take Arab names. The Christian
count of the Christian community at Cordova, who was entrusted bv the Umayyad
amir Hakam I (imperabat a . d . 796-822) in a . d . 805 with the command of the slave corps
and then in a . d . 818 with the collection of newly imposed taxes, was named Rabi' son
of Tcodulfo (ibid., pp. 116-17). A Christian bishop, Rabi' b. Zayd, whose Christian
name was Reccmundo, was employed by ‘Abd-ar-Rahmin III to obtain objels d'ari for
him from Syria or Constantinople (ibid., p. 373) and was sent by him in a . d . 955 on an
embassy to Otto I at Frankfort, where he met Bishop Liutprand of Cremona and per¬
suaded him to write his Antapodotis (ibid., p. 388). This adoption of Arab names was a
symptom of the proclivity towards the Arab culture which won for the Andalusian
Arabs’ Iberian Christian subjects the nickname musta'rib&n ('Arabizers'), as a synonym
for mu' 5 hid 0 n or mu'AhadUn ('contractual clients').

The cultural bonds between Christian subjects and Muslim masters in Andalusia
were linguistic. A vernacular Romance koini, which was spoken by ‘Abd-ar-Rahmin
III (ibid., p. 285), is thought by L6vy-Proyen$al (ibid., p. 55) to have been the most
widely current language among the Andalusian Muslims (compare the currency of the
local Romaic Greek vernaculars among members of the Ottoman Muslim ascendancy
in the Morca (see p. 683, below) and the Venetian ascendancy in the Ionian Islands (sec
p. 170, above) in the early years of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era).
Conversely, the musta'ribOn took pride and pleasure in talking Arabic, composing
Arabic poetry, and producing versions of Arabic literary forms in the medium of their
native Romance.

The relation between the two communities was so intimate, and the atmosphere of
toleration so strong, that there was at least one notorious case of counter-conversion to
Christianity from Islam. The rebel 'Umar b. HafsOn and his wife turned Christian in
a.d. 899 (ibid., p. 265), and their eldest son and their daughter Argcntea followed their
example, while the three other sons remained Muslims (ibid., p. 293). After 'Umar’s
last son had been compelled by 'Abd-ar-Rahman III to surrender the fortress of
Bobastro on the 19th January, 928, Argentea went into a convent. She provoked martyr¬
dom on the 13th May, 937 (ibid., d. 296).

1 Known, in the terminology of Assyrian political geography, as Tabal—'the High¬
lands’ par excellence.

368 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

The Armenians who encountered the Crusaders after ensconcing
themselves in the fastnesses of the Taurus and the Antitaurus in the
eleventh century of the Christian Era were refugees from the North, like
the Hittites who had found refuge in the same region in the twelfth
century b.c. The invading ‘Sea Peoples’ and Phrygians, who in that
age had overwhelmed a Hittite Power whose capital had crowned
Boghazqal'eh in East Central Anatolia, had their counterparts in the
eleventh century of the Christian Era in the East Roman Imperial
Government and the Saljuq Turkish Eurasian Nomads. In its expansion
at the expense of a disintegrating ‘Abbasid Caliphate the East Roman
Empire illiberally and unwisely extinguished the recently won indepen¬
dence of the Caliphate’s Armenian successor-states in the highlands on
the watershed between the basins of the Euphrates and the Aras, and
thereby deprived itself of potential Armenian buffer-states against a
Nomad invasion of Anatolia along the customary route up the Aras and
down the Upper Euphrates’ northern branch (Turcick Frat Su, alias
Qara Su). Gaghik II, the last king of Ani, the foremost of these Armenian
principalities, was compelled by the East Roman Government to cede
his dominions to them in a . d . 1045, 1 after Senekherim, the last king of
Vaspurakan—the most easterly of the Armenian principalities and there¬
fore the most dangerously exposed of them all—had voluntarily ceded
his dominions to the East Roman Emperor Basil II in a . d . 1021 under
the menace of the onset of the Saljuq wave. 2 The East Romans were so
far from being able to defend their newly acquired Armenian marches
against their Saljuq assailants that they lost not only these but the heart
of their ancestral dominions in Anatolia a3 well. After a spell of less
than twenty years under East Roman rule, Ani was sacked by the Saljuqs
in a . d . 1064; 3 and the crushing defeat which the East Romans suffered
at Saljuq handsat Melazkerd in a . d . 1071 opened the way for the Saljuqs’
permanent conquest of Sivas, Qaysari, and QSniych and their temporary
occupation of Nicaea almost within sight of the Sea of Marmara.

This collapse of the East Roman Empire in Anatolia gave the
Armenians an opportunity’ to compensate themselves for their lost
homelands by carving out a new realm in a different quarter. The East
Roman Government had unintentionally prepared the ground for this
by planting Armenian wardens of the marches at strategic points com¬
manding the passes through the Taurus and the Amanus after the East
Roman conquest of Cilicia and Antioch from the successors of the
‘Abbasid Caliphate in and after a . d . 964/ and by assigning domains,
inside the previous East Roman frontiers, to the Armenian kings whose
dominions they had annexed in the eleventh century. Sivas had been
assigned to Senekherim, the ex-king of Vaspurakan, in a.d. 1021, 5 and
the army-corps district of Lykandos, in the mountains between Cappa¬
docia, Commagcne, and Cilicia, to Gaghik, the ex-king of Ani, in a . d .
1045. 6 The Armenians’ bitterness against an East Roman Empire that
had deprived them of their political independence in their homelands

1 Sec de Morgan, J.: Histoire du Peuple Armimen (Paris 1919. Berger-Levrault), pp.

_ s See dc Morgan, op. cit., p. 140.

1 See de Morgan, op. cit., p. 156. * See ibid., pp. 162-3 and 165-6.

* See ibid., p. 149. 6 See ibid., p. 152.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 369
was aggravated by the ill-treatment to which they were subsequently
subjected in exile on East Roman soil; they seized their first chance of
shaking off a hated yoke; and the East Roman military disaster of a.d.
1071 was followed in a.d. 1080 by the establishment of an independent
Armenian principality in the mountains overhanging the Cilician Plain. 1
In a.d. 1097, in the reign of Prince Constantine I {dominabatur a.d.
1095-9), l ^ c son an( * successor of the founder, Rupen (dominabatur a.d.
1080-95), these recently liberated Armenians in the Taurus fraternized
with the warriors of the First Crusade during their passage through Cilicia
to lay siege to Antioch; and this fraternization made the new-born
Armenian principality’s fortune, besides being of substantial assistance
to the Western Christian adventurers in the Levant.

Refugee Armenians and errant Crusaders were, indeed, drawn
together by the powerful bond of a common enmity towards both the
Orthodox Christians and the Muslims, between whom the Crusaders
and the Armenians both found themselves caught in a vice, and it was
a godsend for either party to be able to join hands with the other. With
the Crusaders’ help, Constantine’s successor Thoros I (dominabatur
a.d. 1099-1129) was able to descend from his mountains and to conquer
the fertile Cilician plain, and this conquest not only increased the
Armenian principality’s strength but gave it a coastline which brought it
into direct relations with a Western Christendom that had just wrested
the ‘thalassocracy’ of the Mediterranean out of Maghrib! Muslim and
East Roman Orthodox Christian hands. 2 The Armenians were willing
converts to the contemporary Western Christian culture. Constantine I
married his daughter to Count Jocelyn of Edessa and his niece (the
daughter of his brother and successor Thoros) to Baldwin the brother of
Godfrey of Bouillon. 3 Prince Leo II {dominabatur a . d . 1187-96) decided
that the Cilician Armenian principality could no longer afford to remain
in the comparative isolation to which it was still condemned by its lack
of any legitimate political status and by the ecclesiastical gulf which
insulated the Gregorian Monophysite Church from both the Eastern
Orthodox and the Western Catholic Christian communion. Prince Leo
determined to purchase his recognition as a legitimate king from one
or other of these two preponderant Christendoms by paying the price of
ecclesiastical union; and, after a half-hearted attempt at union with his
unloved Orthodox Christian neighbours, he eventually achieved union
with the more distant and less odious Latins. The terms were agreed
between Prince Leo and the Vatican in a . d . 1196, and at Tarsus in a.d.
1199 the Armenian prince was crowned king (regnabat a.d. 1199-1219
as King Leo I) by a Uniatc Armenian catholicos in the presence of a
representative of the Pope. 4

This formal admission of a Cilician Armenia to membership in the
body social and ecclesiastical of Western Christendom gave an impetus
to the Westernization of King Leo’s realm. The Armenian Kingdom
accepted the institutions of Western feudalism in adopting the Assizes of
Antioch, and an educated minority of laymen, as well as the Uniate

' Sec ibid., pp. 162 and x66. * See p. 3 S*. above.

3 See de Morgan, op. cic., p. 169. * See ibid., pp. 187-93.

370 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
clergy, became conversant with the Latin and French languages. In
fact, the Cilician Kingdom of Armenia became an integral part of the
Western Terre d’Outre Mer in the Levant, 1 and it was the last of the
Continental Crusader principalities to succumb to an Islamic counter¬
attack. After the Egyptian Mamluks had deprived the Crusaders of their
last continental bridgehead south-east of the Amanus by capturing Acre
in a.d. 1291, Cilician Armenia continued to hold out for the best part of
a century before it, too, lost its political independence through the
Mamluks’ capture of its capital city, Sis, in a.d. 1375 from its last king,
Leo V dc Lusignan ( regnabat a.d. 1374-5). 2

After the fall of the Cilician Armenian kingdom, the local Armenian
communities themselves survived in their highland fastnesses for
another five centuries and more, under successive Mamluk, Dhu’lqadrI,
and Ottoman regimes, till they were wiped out in the terrible deporta¬
tions of a.d. 1915; but the loss of their political independence had cut
them off from their access to the sea and, in consequence, also from their
contact with Western Christendom. By contrast, the Maronites, whose
Lebanese fastness had been embraced in the domain of the Syrian
Crusader principalities and who, like the Cilician Armenians, had
entered into an ecclesiastical union with the Western Church, were able,
thanks to their proximity to one of the shores of the Mediterranean, to
keep in touch with the Western World throughout the five centuries
that intervened between the fall of Acre in a.d. 1291 and the revival of
Western interest in the Levant towards the close of the eighteenth
century of the Christian Era. The Maronites’ earliest link with the
Modern Western World was through France, who won over them in
the nineteenth century a political influence which she forfeited in the
twentieth century through an injudicious exercise of a mandatory
authority over the Lebanon during the years a.d. 1920-44. The Maro¬
nites established a second link with the Modern West through the
United States; and, at the time of writing, the French Catholic and
American Protestant universities at Bayrut were living monuments of a

1 This Francophiliam of the Armenian ‘displaced persona’ who had carved out for
themaelve* a successor-state of the East Roman Empire in Cilicia was shared by con¬
temporary Armenian communities settled in territories then still under East Roman rule.
In a . d . 1189. when Frederick Barbarossa was on the march, through East Roman terri¬
tory, from the Danube to the Dardanelles, the Armenians at Philippopolis and Prou-
sinds fraternized with his army—in contrast to their Orthodox Christian neighbours,
who evacuated their homes on the Western Crusaders’ approach (sec Nikitas Khoniatis,
Khroniki Dhiiyisis (Bonn 1835, Weber), pp. 527 and 534); and, after the overthrow of
the East Roman regime by the Western perpetrators of the so-called ‘Fourth Crusade’
in a . d . 1204, the Armenians of the Troad, like their Latin neighbours at Pighai (Bigha),
invited the newly elected Latin Emperor, Baldwin of Flanders, to come over into
Opsikion to help them, and raised some troops of horse to serve with him when he
arrived (ibid., pp. 70 S -6 a °d 8t4; Villehardouin. Geofiroi de: Conqutte de Constanti¬
nople, chap. 69, § 3 to, third edition of N. de Wailly’s text and translation (Paris 1882,
Didot), pp. 184 and 191). When the Crusaders found themselves compelled to evacuate
their conquests on the Anatolian side of the Dardanelles, these Armenians emigrated
with them en masse to the number of about twenty thousand, including the women and
children, with their movable property loaded in wagons (Villehardouin, chap. 87, § 380,
p. 226). They were all massacred by the local Greek population in Thrace (ibid., chap.
* 7 , §385. P- 228).

Nikita* Khoniitis notes (p. 527) several points of Christian ecclesiastical practice in
which the Armenians took the same line as the Western Christians in common disagree¬
ment with the Eastern Orthodox Church.

2 See de Morgan, op. cit., p. 235.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 371
mutual attraction between the Maronites and the Western World which
had persisted since the Age of the Crusades without a break.

The Crusaders’ relations with the Maronites of the Lebanon and the
Armenians of Cilicia were manifestly more intimate than their relations
with the Muslims who, during the period of the Crusades, became the
majority instead of a minority in the population of a disintegrating
Syriac World; yet, considering that Muslims and Christians ranked
officially as ‘unbelievers’ in one anothers’ eyes, and that the champions
of these two fanatically exclusive-minded Judaic religions were chroni¬
cally at war, we may marvel at the degree of the mutual respect which
their fighting-men came to feel for one another, and at the amount and
the importance of the cultural nourishment which a Medieval Western
Christendom imbibed through a Syriac channel in which the spirit and
technique of an Arabic poetry- were conveyed to them in a Romance
language by Provencal troubadours, and the ideas of an Hellenic philo¬
sophy in the Arabic language by Muslim scholars.

In the realm of the sword the sympathy between the warriors in the
two opposing camps arose from the surprising discovery of an unexpected
affinity. On the battlefields of Andalusia the Andalusian Muslims and
the transfronticr Christian barbarians who were their coinhabitants of
the Iberian Peninsula sometimes felt a closer kinship with one another
than the Iberian Christians could feel with their coreligionists from
beyond the Pyrenees, or the Iberian Muslims with their coreligionists
from the Sahara and the Atlas, when they were each enjoying the doubt¬
ful blessing of being reinforced by these officially laudable but practically
awkward allies. On the battlefields of Syria the Turkish barbarians who
had become converts to Islam in the act of overrunning the dominions
of the Caliphate were not unsympathetic adversaries for Western
Christian knights who, in degree of civilization, were still not far above
the level of their own barbarian predecessors who had become converts
to Christianity in the act of overrunning the Roman Empire some six
centuries earlier. In the Turkish ghazis the Crusaders were meeting
their barbarian predecessors’ counterparts—and the Normans their own
counterparts, considering that these ‘Hagarcnes’, who were the spear¬
head of the Frankish offensive in the Mediterranean in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, were as recent converts from Barbarism as the Saljuqs.

In the realm of the pen the Crusaders’ temporary conquests in Syria,
and still more their lasting conquests in Sicily and Andalusia, at the
expense of Dar-al-Islam became so many transmitting stations through
which the spiritual treasures in the storehouse of a moribund Syriac
World were communicated to a Medieval Western Christendom . 1 The

1 The successive stages in the process of transmission in Andalusia could be distin¬
guished in the surviving historical record. The first stage was the marriage of Christian
princesses from the independent barbarian Christian principalities in the North-West
of the Iberian Peninsula by Umayyad amirs and caliphs and by ‘Amirid dictators before
the collapse of the Andalusian Muslim power in a.d. 1009. The second stage was the
employment of transfrontier barbarian Christian mercenaries by Andalusian Muslim
governments. The third stage—for which the second opened the way—was the conquest
of Andalusia by the Peninsular barbarian Christian principalities. The fourth stage was
the migration of musta'rib Christians from the still independent Andalusian Muslim
principalities into the expanded Peninsular Christian Kingdoms. The fifth stage was the

372 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
genial atmosphere of religious tolerance and intellectual curiosity, which
temporarily captivated the Western Christian conquerors of Palermo
and Toledo in virtue of its shining contrast to their own traditional
fanaticism, was native to an Early Islam; 2 but the cultural treasures

radiation of the musta'rib culture of the Andalusian Caliphate's Peninsular Christian
successor-states into the Transpyrcnaean heart of Western Christendom.

The Cordovan Umayyad Caliph 'Abd-ar-Rahmin III (nalus A.D. 891) had a Christian
mother and grandmother (L<vy-Provenial, op. cit., p. 284), and his predecessor 'Abdal¬
lah (imperabat A.D. 888-0x2) may have owed his blondness to Christian maternal
ancestresses (ibid., p. 231), though ' Abd-ar-RahmSn I, the founder of the Andalusian
Umayyad line, must have owed his (ibid., p. 98) to his Nafzah Berber mother (ibid., p.
67). The dictator Al-Mansur married Abarca, the daughter of Sancho Garc<s II of
Na%-arre (who paid a state visit to his son-in-law at Cordova in A.D. 992), and also a
daughter of Bermudo II of Ledn, who returned to Lc6n and took the veil after her
Cordovan Muslim husband’s death (ibid., pp. 437-8). The Andalusian Muslim prac¬
tice of employing transfronticr Christian mercenaries can be traced at least as far back
as the reign of the Umayyad amir Hakam I (imperabat a.d. 796-822), whose favourite
guards were a band of 150 Narbonnese prisoners of war (ibid., p. 133). Al-Mansur
(dominabatur a.d. 981-1002I substituted Christian and Maghrib! Berber Muslim mer¬
cenaries for the si* Andalusian Arab junds which had originated in vexUIaliones brought
to Andalusia in a.d. 74 * by Balj b. Bishr al Qusayri (ibid., pp. 427 and 32-33) from the
Arab junds cantoned along the desert coast of Syria and in Palestine and Egypt (see VI.
vii. 130-1). The conquest of Andalusia (all save one fastness round Granada) by the
Peninsular barbarian Christian principalities between a.d. 1085 arid a.d. 1248 exposed
them to the radiation of the culture of their new Muslim subjects in the annexed terri¬
tories, and the transplantation of musta'rib Christians into the interior of the Andalusian
Caliphate’s Christian successor-states carried the Andalusian culture, through the
agency of these Arabizing Christian immigrants, into the North-West of the Peninsula,
where the original Arab and Berber Muslim invaders had failed to maintain themselves.
The Transpyrcnaean Frankish pilgrims to Compostela and volunteers in the armies of
the Peninsular Christian conquerors of Andalusia played their part as carriers, in their
turn, by importing a Peninsular musu 'rib culture into regions of Western Christendom,
north of the Loire, to which the eighth-century Arab raiders had never penetrated.

2 As witness—to cite one document from tnc file of evidence—the following testi¬
mony from a party of eighth-century English pilgrims to the Christian Holy Land.

"At the time [of his arrival at Emcsa circa a.d. 723), Willibald had with him seven of
his fellow-countrymen, making a party of eight, including Willibald himself. They had
no sooner arrived than the heathen Saracens, finding that a party of unknown foreigners
had made their appearance in the city, arrested them and kept them under detention,
as they did not know their nationality and did suspect them of being spies. They brought
them, under detention, before an elderly man of substance to be inspected by him and to
have their provenance identified. This elderly man interrogated them—asking them
where they came from and what was their business. They replied by giving him a cir¬
cumstantial account of the reason for their journey, going right back to the beginning;
and to this the elder's reply was: “I have often seen people from those parts of the
World—fellow-countrymen of these people—coming here; they intend no mischief;
all that they want is to fulfil their law.”

'Then they left the court and proceeded to Government House, to ask for a transit
visa to Jerusalem, but they had no sooner presented themselves than the governor de¬
clared them to be spies and gave orders for them to be thrown into prison until he had
had time to obtain instructions about their case from the King. After they had thus found
themselves in prison, the marvellous dispensation of Almighty God—who, with His
fatherly care, has everywhere deigned to cover his children with his shield and preserve
them unharmed among missiles and engines of war, among savages and fighting-men,
in prison and among hordes of miscreants—moved a man who was in business there to
bestir himself, out of charity and for his soul’s salvation, to ransom them and secure their
release from prison, in order that they might be free to go wherever they might wish.
In this he was unsuccessful, but on the other hand he had luncheon and dinner sent in
for them every day; and on Wednesdays and Saturdays he used to send his son to the
prison to escort them to the public baths and return them to prison again, while on
Sundays he used to take them to church through the bazaars, to give them the oppor¬
tunity of seeing anything that might take their fancy among the goods on sale there, and
to give himself the opportunity of buving for them, out of his own pocket, whatever
might suit their taste. The townspeople’s curiosity was aroused by the party to such a
degree that they soon fell into the habit of coming there regularly to look at them (they
were young and handsome and well dressed).

'After that, while they were serving their time in prison, a man from Spain came and

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 73
which, in this propitious environment, Western minds consented to
receive from Muslim and Jewish hands during the next two hundred
years were of Hellenic as well as Syriac origin. The Syriac Society was
not the creator, but was merely the carrier, of authentic and apocryphal
works of the Hellenic philosopher Aristotle which were made accessible
to twelfth-century Western schoolmen by being translated into Latin out
of Arabic versions in which they had been preserved thanks to the labours
of Syriac scholars who had been assiduously translating the corpus of
Hellenic philosophy, mathematics, physical science, and medicine into
Syriac from the original Greek since the fourth century of the Christian
Era 1 and into Arabic, both from the earlier Syriac versions and also
from the original Greek, since the ninth century. 2

In mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, in contrast to philosophy
and terrestrial physical science, the Syriac-speaking Nestorian Christian
pupils of the Hellenes and the Arabic-speaking Muslim pupils of these
Nestorian Christians had not only preserved and mastered the achieve¬
ments of their Hellenic predecessors but had also taken lessons in an
Indie school and had gone on to achieve original work of their own
based on these Hellenic and Indie foundations. In these fields a Medieval
Western Christendom took over from contemporary Muslim men of

talked to them in the prison. He made detailed inquiries as to who they were and what
their native country was ; and they gave him full and consecutive information about their
journey. This Spaniard had a brother in the King's palace who was one of the King of
the Saracens' chamberlains. So, when the governor who was consigning them to prison
came to the palace, the Spaniard who had been talking to them in the prison, and the
master-mariner in whose ship they had made their passage from Cyprus, presented
themselves together before the King of the Saracens, whose title is Amir al-Muminin.
After their case had come up for consideration, the Spaniard informed his brother of
everything that the Englishmen had told him in the prison, and asked him to pass on
the information to the King and to do what he could for them. Eventually all three of
them together had an audience of the King and informed him seriatim of all the facts
in the prisoners’ case. The King asked them what country they came from, and they
said: "The West, where the Sun sets, is these people’s home, and we do not know of
any country farther west than that or of anything but open sea in that direction’’.
Addressing himself to the deputation, the King replied: "Why do we have to punish
them ? They have committed no offence against us. Give them their visas and let them
go." Other people under detention in prison had to pay a fee, but in their case this was
remitted’ {Hodoeporicon Saneli Willibaldi, in Tobfer, T., and Molinier, A. fedd.]:
Itinera Hierosolymitana et Dtscriptior.es Terrae Sanctae Beilis Sacris Anteriora et Latind
Lingud Exarata (Geneva 1879^85. Fich, 2 yols.), vol. i, pp. 258-60).

The spirit of tolerance that is illustrated in this narrative was imported by the Primi¬
tive Muslim Arabs from Syria into Andalusia. In A.D. 785, when ‘Abd-ar-Rahman I
wanted to enlarge the Mosauc at Cordova, he did not confiscate, but bought, the half
of the site that till then had been left to the Christians (L6vy-Proven$al, op. cit., p. 95).
In the sixth decade of the ninth century of the Christian Era, when there was an outburst
of fanatical fervour in the Christian community at Cordova, it proved as difficult to
force the hand of the Umayyad authorities into bestowing the crown of martyrdom as it
had been to force the Roman authorities’ hand in similar circumstances seven or six
centuries earlier (L^vy-Proven^al, op. cit., pp. 159-67). There was a statue of the Virgin
Mary over the Bridge Gate of the Umayyad city of Cordova (L6vy-Provencal, op. cit.,
p. 371), and a statue of a woman was even placed over the gate of ‘Abd-ar-Rahman Ill’s
summer palace at Madinat-az-Zahrah, on which work was started on the 19th November,
936. This second statue was removed in a.d. 1190—in an age of adversity in which a
pristine tolerance was fighting a losing battle in Muslim hearts against rising feelings
of resentment and apprehension (see pp. 365-6, above)—by order of the Muwahhid
Berber ‘liberator’ of Andalusia, Ya’qub Al-Mansur (ibid.).

1 See O’Leary, op.cit., p. 51, and p. ao 8 , n. 5, below.

* See Swcetman, J. W.: Islam and Christian Theology, Part I, vol. i (London 1945 .
Lutterworth Press), pp. 84-93 > O’Leary, op. cit., pp. r 55-75; and the present Study.p. 408,
n. 5. The renaissance of an Hellenic philosophy and science in a Medieval Western
Christendom through an Arabic medium is examined further in X. ix. 45-47, below.

374 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

science the results of the Muslims’ own researches as well as the classical
Hellenic body of knowledge which the Syriac Society had preserved in
an Arabic dress and the system of mathematical notation which it had
acquired in India ; 1 and, when we raise our eyes from the intellectual
to the poetic plane, we shall see that, at this high level, the treasure that
was acquired by a Medieval Western Christendom from the Andalusian
Muslim representatives of a dying Syriac culture was a native Arab
achievement which was to inspire all the subsequent achievements of a
Western school of poetry down to the close of the Western Civilization’s
Modern Age—if it is true that the ideas and ideals, as well as the versifi¬
cation and rhyming, of this Western school’s Provencal troubadour
pioneers can be traced back to an Andalusian Muslim source . 2

At the time of writing in the twentieth century of the Christian Era
the body of mathematical, astronomical, and medical science which
had proved so stimulating to Medieval Western minds when they had
received it from the Muslim epigoni of the Ncstorian pupils of the
Greeks had long since been superseded in the Western World by a series
of original Western discoveries which had transformed Man’s vision of
the Physical Universe, and a Western poetic tradition that had survived
the transition from a Medieval to a Modern Age was being battered by
the more violent break that the advent of a post-Modern Age had
brought with it; yet, in the revolutionary dawn of this new chapter of
Western history, the impact of a moribund Syriac Civilization on the
youthfully impressionable imagination of a Medieval Western Christen¬
dom was still being proclaimed, with the silent eloquence of a visual
testimony, in the realm of Architecture by ‘Gothic’ buildings which—in
confutation of the misleading nickname that had been conferred on
them by eighteenth-century Western antiquaries—bore on their face a
patent certificate of the derivation of this Medieval Western style from
models still extant in the ruins of Armenian churches at Ani and of
Saljuq caravanserais on desert roads in Anatolia.

In the twentieth century the cities of Western Europe were still
dominated by ‘Gothic’ cathedrals which had superseded their Roman¬
esque predecessors as the result of a Medieval Western architectural
revolution precipitated by the architectural impact of the Syriac World.
But these medieval ‘Gothic’ ecclesiastical monuments of Syriac in¬
fluence in the European homeland of an expanding Modern Western
World’s domain were not such impressive evidence—profoundly impres¬
sive though they were—as the modern Neo-Gothic ‘sky-scrapers’
which held their own on the sky-line of a twentieth-century New York
against streamlined Towers of Babel, or as the Neo-Gothic halls and
libraries and dormitories of contemporary American universities at
Princeton, New Haven, and Chicago. An invading Syriac architecture’s

1 The names of the Transoxanian poet-philosopher-theologian-physician Abu *AH b.
Sinl {vivebat a.d. 980-1037) and the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd {vivebat
A.D. 1126-98) became household words in a Medieval Western Christendom in the out¬
landish distortions 'Avicenna’ and ‘Averroes’.

1 The arguments for this derivation of the troubadours’ art arc set out by Christopher
Dawson in an illuminating essay on 'The Origins of the Romantic Tradition' in his
Mediaeval Religion (London 1934, Sheed and Ward), pp. 123-54.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 7 S
achievement of supplanting the Romanesque style on its native Western
ground in the medieval chapter of Western history was assuredly sur¬
passed by the tour de force of its latter-day return to the charge in a
Modern Western ‘Gothic Revival’ that was its successful revenge upon
an ephemeral Modern Western Classical Renaissance. 1

3. The Medieval West and Greek Orthodox Christendom 2

While lesser Christian communities, such as the Lebanese Mono-
theletes or the Cilician Armenian Monophysites, could reconcile them¬
selves, albeit with a pang, to union with one of the two principal
surviving Christian Churches as an alternative to the still bleaker doom
of extinction, the adherents of the Eastern Orthodox and the Western
Catholic Church found it more difficult to come to terms with one
another than with their Muslim neighbours.

This discord between the Medieval Western Christians and their
Eastern Orthodox Christian contemporaries was a consequence of the
historical fact that the Hellenic Civilization had given birth to two
daughter societies; for, on the morrow of their simultaneous emergence
towards the close of the seventh century of the Christian Era, some five
hundred years before the final breach between them in the tragic years
a.d. 1182-1 204, 3 these two Hellenistic Christian civilizations had already
begun to be alienated from one another by a diversity in Sthos and by
a conflict of interests. In the course of the next five centuries the diver¬
sity in ethos was progressively accentuated by differences between the
two sister societies’ respective experiences in successive chapters of
their separate histories, while the conflict of interests came to a head in
a competition for political and cultural predominance in South-Eastern
Europe and Southern Italy. This struggle for power was embittered by
the two competing societies’ rival claims each to be the sole legitimate
heir of a Christian universal church, a Roman Empire, and an Hellenic
Civilization which, in the last chapter of its history, had embodied itself
in the Roman Empire as its universal state; for these competing ideolo¬
gical pretensions were ultimately irreconcilable.

The political conflict was apt to be masked under the form of ecclesi¬
astical controversies in which questions of ritual practice and of ecclesi¬
astical jurisdiction and discipline played a more prominent part than
questions of theological doctrine. 4 For example, when in the eighth
century the Roman See took sides, in a quarrel in Eastern Orthodox
Christendom over image-worship, against the iconoclastic policy of the
East Roman Imperial Government, it was declaring, on behalf of the
people of the Ducatus Romanus, the Exarchate of Ravenna, and other

< For the archaistic revival of the ‘Gothic’ medieval style of architecture in the
Modern West, see V. vi. 60. For the Modem Western Classical Renaissance in the realm
of Architecture, see X. ix. 83-86. 2 See xi, maps 33, 34, 37, 38, 39 , 4 °, 4 «.

1 The three atrocious acts that made the breach flagrant and irreparable were the
massacre of Frankish residents in the East Roman Empire in a.d. 1182, the sack of
Salonica by an avenging Norman expeditionary force in a.d. 1183, and the sack of Con¬
stantinople by a Franco-Venetian expeditionary’ force in a.d. 1204 ('the Fourth Crusade’).

* In Eastern Orthodox Christendom 'popular interest veered from theological to
liturgical issues ... as early as the sixth century’ (Every, G.: The Byzantine Patriarchate,
451-1204 (London 1947, S.P.C.K.), p. 27).

376 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
then still surviving fragments of the Roman Empire in Central Italy, a
political decision to look beyond the Alps, to Austrasia, for a desperately
needed military protection against their aggressive Lombard neighbours
which they had failed to obtain from a Transadriatic Imperial Power at
Constantinople. 1 When Pope Nicholas I refused in a.d. 862 to recognize
Photius and went on in a.d. 863 to have him condemned by a Roman
synod, 2 and when Photius retorted by having Nicholas condemned
by a Constantinopolitan synod of a.d. 867, J the two prelates were
playing ecclesiastical cards in a political game in which the stakes
were the future allegiance of the hitherto pagan peoples of South-
Eastern Europe between Adrianoplc and Vienna. 4 When, mid-way
through the eleventh century, a movement for standardizing ritual
usages in the domain of the Roman See, which had been initiated in
a.d. 1045 by Pope Gregor)' Vi’s appointment of Hildebrand to be his
capellanus , s collided with a corresponding movement inaugurated in
the domain of the Oecumenical Patriarchate by Michael Cerularius
after his accession to the throne of the Constantinopolitan See in a.d.
1043, a liturgical conflict which caused the schism of a.d. 1054 was at
the same time a political contest for the allegiance of ecclesiastical sub¬
jects of the Papacy in Southern Italy who were political subjects of the
East Roman Empire. 6

Though, in each of these three successive collisions, the ecclesiastical
controversy masked a clash of political interests and was loaded with
psychological charges of ideological animus and cultural antipathy, no
one on either side on any of the three occasions seems to have been
deliberately working for a breach. On the two first occasions of the
three, the Papacy was tempted to exploit an opportunity for advancing
its own interests which had been thrown in its way through its having
been invited by one of two factions in Eastern Orthodox Christendom
to intervene in a domestic quarrel within the bosom of the Eastern
Orthodox Church ; 7 and on both occasions the ecclesiastical controversy

pp.

1 See Dvomi^V.: ^he~^hotian Schism (Cambridge 1048, University Press),
93"98. > See ibid., pp. rao-r.

4 See IV. iv. 379-81 and 605-10. * See IV. iv. 529 and 536.

* See Runciman, S.: A History of the Crusades, vol. i (Cambridge 1951, University
Press), p. 96, and the present Study, IV. iv. 6r2-i4- As Runciman puts it, 'the dispute
was over usages; and it therefore raised the problem of the ecclesiastical frontier in
Italy, a problem made more acute by the invasion of the Normans, themselves members
of the Latin Church’. This was, however, only an incidental result of a policy of Gleich-
schaltung which had been aimed by Cerularius, not at the Lombard Catholic Christians
in Southern Italy, who had been allowed to continue to follow the Latin rite and to
remain under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Roman See after they had come under
the East Roman Empire’s rule at the turn of the ninth and tenth centuries (see IV. iv.
343-4 and 6xo-t 1), but at the recently annexed Gregorian Monophysite Christians in
Armenia. ‘His original motive was to absorb more easily the churches of the newly
occupied Armenian provinces . . . But his policy affected also the Latin churches in
Byzantine Italy and those that existed in Constantinople itself for the benefit of mer¬
chants, pilgrims, and soldiers of the Varangian Guard'(Runciman, op. cit., p. 96).

i One of the most illuminating of the new lights in Uvornik’s The Photian Schism is
his exposition of the importance of the part played in the collision of a . d . 862-80 be¬
tween Photius and the Roman See by a struggle between two factions within the Con¬
stantinopolitan Church. It was only human that the Roman See should have attempted
to profit by the situation, but this was always a dangerous game for the Vatican to play
in a Constantinopolitan ecclesiastical arena; for, though in domestic ecclesiastical con¬
troversies in the East Roman Empire it was an obvious recourse for a faction to appeal

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 377
between East and West was eventually composed on the basis of a tacit
compromise over the underlying political conflict. When the eighth-
century controversy between the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate and
the Roman See was settled by the Constantinopolitan Church's repudia¬
tions of Iconoclasm in a . d . 787 and a . d . 842, the East Roman Imperial
Government was acquiescing in the loss of its political sovereignty over
the Ducatus Romanus and the Exarchate of Ravenna, while the Roman
See was acquiescing in the loss of its ecclesiastical sovereignty over the
‘toe’ and ‘heel’ of Italy, as well as over Sicily and the Praetorian Prefec¬
ture of Illyricum. When the ninth-century controversy was settled in
a . d . 879-80, the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate was acquiescing in the
loss of its mission-field in Moravia, and the Roman Sec in the defeat of
its hopes of acquiring jurisdiction over Bulgaria.

The reconciliation between the Roman and the Constantinopolitan
Church in a . d . 879-88 would become easier to understand if it should
prove that, contrary to the traditional reading of the historical evidence,
the Photian Synod of Constantinople in a.d. 867 did not, after all, either
explicitly denounce the Western Church for having interpolated the
filioque clause in the Creed 1 or explicitly deny the Roman See’s primacy
over other patriarchal churches. 2 However that may be, there appears
to be no doubt that in a.d. 1054 the ecclesiastical combatants on both
sides exercised some self-restraint in refraining from aggravating a new
breach by making theological denunciations against one another. The
bull excommunicating the Oecumenical Patriarch Michael Cerularius
and his advisers, which the departing Papal legates left on the altar of
St. Sophia at Constantinople in that unhappy year, expressly admitted
the orthodoxy of the Byzantine Church, 3 and the Constantinopolitan
synod convened by Cerularius condemned, in its counterblast, the bull,
the interpolation of the filioque clause in the creed, and the persecution of
married clergy without expressly attaching to the Roman Church the
responsibility for these offences. 4 In whatever ratios the responsibility
for the breach in a.d. 1054 is to be apportioned between the Oecumeni¬
cal Patriarch and the three Papal legates, it is clear that it was deplored
by a majority on both sides. Occurring, as it did, at a moment when the
Vatican and the East Roman Government had a common political interest
in checking the conquests of the Normans in Southern Italy at the

to the Vatican when their opponent* had outmanreuvrcd them on the home front by
securing the support of the East Roman Imperial Government, the warring Byzantine
ecclesiastical factions were apt to close their ranks when their dissension manifestly
threatened to jeopardize some vital East Roman interest. Ignatius, for example, who
owed his reinstatement on the Patriarchal throne at Constantinople to the Roman Sec’s
intervention on his behalf, proved as unwilling as his deposed rival Photius had been
to resign Bulgaria to the Roman See’s jurisdiction (Dvornik, op. cit., pp. 151-8); and a
reconciliation between Ignatians and Photians circa A.D. 876 (Dvornik, op. cit., pp. 169-
71) prepared the way for the reconciliation in a.d. 879-80 between the Roman Sec and
a Constantinopolitan Church that was now reunited under the presidcncyof a Photius
who had been reinstated on the Patriarchal throne. Such experiences taught Eastern
Orthodox Christendom that it* domestic dissensions were an aggressive-minded Roman
See’s temptations and opportunities; and the feud between Photians and Ignatians, as
well as the subsequent feud between Nicolilans and Euthymians (see IV. iv. 598-9),
was solemnly consigned to oblivion at synods held in Constantinople in a.d. 920 and
A.D. 991 (Dvornik, op. cit., p. 434).

« See Dvornik, op. cit., pp. 122-3.

3 See Runciman, op. cit., p, 97.

2 See ibid., pp. 123-9.
4 See ibid.

378 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

expense of both these Powers, the ecclesiastical breach was deprecated
by both of them for political reasons; and on both sides, for the next
150 years, responsible churchmen did their best at least to prevent the
breach from widening, in so far as they were unable to ignore its
existence.

‘The churches of Alexandria and Jerusalem had taken no part in the
episode. The Patriarch of Antioch, Peter III, definitely thought that
Cerularius had been unnecessarily difficult. His church had continued
to commemorate the Pope’s name in its diptychs, and he saw no reason
why that practice should cease .. . He could not support the standardiza¬
tion of ritual and usage; for his diocese contained churches where a Syrian
liturgy was in use, and many of them lay beyond the political frontiers
of the Empire. He could not have enforced uniformity there, even had he
desired it. He kept himself outside of the quarrel.’ 1

The nearest neighbour to Western Christendom among the Eastern
Orthodox Churches that, in the eleventh century, were independent of
the Patriarchate of Constantinople was the autonomous Archbishopric
of Ochrida, 2 and at some date between a.d. 1090 and a.d. 1095, with an
eye to the current negotiations on the eve of the First Crusade, the in¬
cumbent of this sec, Archbishop Theophylact, published a treatise mini¬
mizing the seriousness of the differences in ritual and theology between
the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Roman Church. 3 At the turn of
the years a.d. 1097-8, when the Crusaders were threatened with famine
under the walls of Antioch, the reigning Patriarch of Jerusalem, Symeon
II, who had published a temperately worded treatise against the Latin
rite, provisioned the Crusading Army from Cyprus, where he was a
refugee; and this practical demonstration of goodwill was reciprocated
in the policy followed by Adhemar, Bishop of Le Puy, Pope Urban II’s
legate auprh the Crusaders. 4 After the capture of Antioch by the
Crusaders on the 3rd June, 1098, ‘the Patriarch John was released from
his prison and replaced on the patriarchal throne. John was a Greek,
who disliked the Latin rite; but he was the legitimate patriarch of a sec
still in full communion with Rome. Adhemar was certainly not going to
offend against legitimacy and local sentiment by ignoring his rights.’ 5
No doubt he would have gone on to reinstate Symeon on the patriarchal
throne of Jerusalem if he and Symeon had lived to see the capture of
Jerusalem in a.d. 1099.

The spirit shown by the Papal legate 6 and the Patriarchs of Jerusalem
and Antioch during the First Crusade was not confined to ecclesiastics.

« Runciman, op. cit., p. 97 * . * Sec IV. iv. 394, n. 1.

* See Every, op. cit., p. 177; Runciman, op. cit., p. 103.

* See; Runciman, S.: ‘Adhemar of Le Puy and the Eastern Churches’, in Aetesdu VI'
Congris International d'Etudes Byzantines, vol. i (Paris 1951).

* Runciman: A History of the Crusades, vol. i, p. 237.

6 Adhemar’s goodwill shines by contrast with the rancour shown, 130 years earlier,
by Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, in his report to the West Roman Emperor Otto II
on his diplomatic mission to Constantinople in a.d. 968-9. In discussing the meaning of
a prophecy in the third-century- Christian Father Hippolytus's De Antichristo, Liut-

S prand rejects with vigour the Byzantine interpretation, current in his day, that Hippo-
js was foreshadowing an union sacrce of Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic
ristendom against Islam in Africa, and offers, as his own, the alternative interpre-
wtion of a joint victory of Otto I and Otto II over Nikiphdros Phokis (Liutprand of
Cremona: Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitand, chaps. 40-41).

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 79
The reigning East Roman Emperor Alexius I Comncnus, on whom the
passage of the First Crusade through his dominions inflicted extreme
political anxiety and personal discomfort, 1 is credited by his daughter
the historian Anna Comnena with a scrupulous reluctance, even under
severe provocation, to authorize his troops to shed their Western fellow
Christians’ blood. The Emperor, as Anna presents him, is determined
to avoid ‘civil war’ between the representatives of the two branches of
the Christian community, 2 * and, when the clash becomes unavoidable, he
instructs his archers to aim at the Franks’ horses in order to break their
charge without taking Christian lives. 1 Later on, Alexius instructs the
governor-general of Durazzo to cite the moral obligation deriving from
a common Christianity as his ground for responding favourably to
Bohcmond’s overtures for the restoration of a peace which Bohemond
himself has treacherously broken. 4 Again, one of the motives attributed
to Alexius by Anna for his policy of sending East Roman forces to convoy
the Crusaders across Anatolia is a concern to save fellow Christians from
being cut to pieces by the Turks. 5 Anna’s husband Nikiphdros Vryennios,
whose Histories she continued after his death, records that his father-in-
law, in his campaign, before his accession to the imperial throne, against
the Norman military adventurer Russell, who was trying to carve a
principality for himself out of the East Roman Empire’s Armeniac
army-corps district, 6 took pains to capture Russell’s rebel Frankish
troopers alive, because he had a scruple against killing enemies who were
his fellow Christians. 7

In the history of the Comnenian Dynasty’s relations with the Frankish
trespassers on Orthodox Christian ground, the wry-faced forbearance
practised by the Emperor Alexius I (imperabat a.d. 1081-m8) was to
be transformed, in the attitude of his grandson and second successor the
Emperor Manuel I (imperabat a.d. 1143-80), into a positive passion for
Frankish comrades and customs; 8 and in the twelfth century, as in the
eleventh, there were clerics on both sides, as well as secular statesmen
on the East Roman side, who were concerned to avert a breach between
the two Christendoms. Though at Antioch, under the rule of the Norman
Bohemond, who was an implacable enemy of the East Roman Empire,
the invading Latin clergy began, on the morrow of Bishop Adhemar’s
death on the 1st August, 1098, to oust the Greek clergy from the diocese,
and drove the reinstated Greek Patriarch John first into resigning and
then into emigrating within two years of the Latin occupation, 9 the
Latin successors of the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem, Symcon II,
justified their claim to be his legitimate heirs by their good treatment of
Eastern Orthodox Christian residents and pilgrims in their patriarchate,
and here, under this liberal dispensation, intercommunion between
Latins and Eastern Orthodox seems to have been common in the twelfth

I See pp. 390-2, below.

» See Anna Comnena: Altxiad, edited by Rciffcracheid, A. (Leipzig 1884, Tcubncr,

2 vol*.), Book X, chap. 0. * See ibid.

* Sec Altxiad, Book XIII, chap. 9. s See Altxiad, Book XIV, chap. 2.

6 See p. 357 , n. 3, above, and p. 389, n. x, below.

’ See Vrycnnio*, N.: Historiae, cd. by Mcineke, A. (Bonn 1836, Weber), p. 85.

* See pp. 392-3, below. ® See Every, op. cit., pp. 162-5.

380 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
century. 1 Circa a.d. 1107-11, in a letter instructing the Benedictine
community in Constantinople not to yield to the Oecumenical Patriarch’s
exhortations to them to conform to the Eastern Orthodox rite, the Abbot
of Monte Cassino, Bruno of Asti, qualified his insistence on the dis¬
tinction between the two rites by reminding his correspondents ‘that,
although the customs of the churches are distinct, nevertheless there is
one faith, indissolubly united to the head, that is Christ, and that He
Himself is one and remains the same in His body’. 2

In a.d. 1190, after the massacre of the Franks in the East Roman
Empire in a.d. 1182 and the Norman sack of Salonica in a.d. 1185, the
Eastern Orthodox titular Patriarch of Antioch, Theodore Balsamon,
ruled, in answer to an inquiry from the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of
Alexandria, whose church had been accustomed to give communion
to Latin prisoners-of-war held by the Muslim rulers of Egypt, that ‘no
Latins should be communicated with unless they first declare that they
will abstain from their doctrines and customs and be in subjection to the
canons, and be made like unto the Orthodox'. 3 Yet, even after the sack
of Constantinople in a.d. 1204 in ‘the Fourth Crusade’, the Metro¬
politan of Ochrida Dhimitrios Khomatinds (fungebatur a.d. 1207-22)
noted 4 that Balsamon’s opinion was criticized by many Eastern Ortho¬
dox authorities ‘as showing too great harshness and bitterness, and an
unjustifiable tone, in blaming the Latin forms and customs, ‘‘because all
this”, they said, “has never been decreed synodically, nor have they ever
been rejected as heretics, but both cat with us and pray with us’”.

According to Runciman, 5 while the schism dates from a.d. iioo in
the Church of Antioch, in the Church of Jerusalem it dates only from
some time after (though not long after) a.d. 1187, and in the Church of
Constantinople only from a.d. 1204, ‘when the Frankish conquerors
appointed a Latin patriarch, ignoring the legitimate patriarch, John
Camatcrus’.

Why was it, then, that a breach between the two Christendoms, which
had been staved off for the best part of five hundred years by the efforts
of clerics and laymen of good will on both sides, came to pass, after all,
in the years a.d. i 182-1204, and thereafter widened until in the fifteenth
century the Eastern Orthodox Christians eventually opted for sub¬
mission to a Muslim Ottoman Padishah’s political dominion in prefer¬
ence to accepting a Western Christian Pope’s ecclesiastical supremacy ? 6
In the last act of this tragedy the immediate stumbling-blocks were

« See Every, op. cit., pp. 159-^2. First-hand evidence of this is to be found in the
Russian Abbot Daniel’s description of the celebration of Easter at Jerusalem in a.d.

«107 (see the English translation of hia narrative (London r 888, Palestine Pilgrims’ Text
Society), pp. 74-S2). Daniel was allowed by King Baldwin (‘he knew me and liked me,
being a man of great kindness and humility’) to place his lamp on the Holy Sepulchre,
in the name of All Russia, to be kindled by the Holy Light. He was allowed to place it on
the tomb itself, beside the lamp of the Greeks and the lamp of the Monastery of St.
Sabbas, whereas the Franks’ lamps were merely suspended above and did not take light
on this occasion.

2 Mignc: Patrologia Latina, vol. clxvi, cols. 1085-90, cited by Every, op. cit., pp.
167-8.

J Migne: Patrologia Gratea, vol. cxxxviii, col. 967, cited by Every, op. cit., p. 165.

* See Migne: Patrologia Graeca, vol. cxix, cols. 056-60, cited ibid.

J ‘Adhcmar of Le Puy and the Eastern Churches', p. 331.

6 Sec pp. 151-2, above.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 381
manifestly Western Christendom’s obstinate insistence on dictating
terms of ecclesiastical union that stamped Eastern Orthodox Christen¬
dom as her inferior, and her no less persistent unwillingness to sweeten
this bitter pill by guaranteeing to the East Roman Imperial Govern¬
ment, as a quid pro quo, that effective military aid would in fact be forth¬
coming from the West if the East Roman political authorities were
unexpectedly to succeed in inducing their clergy and people to follow'
their own heroic example in resigning themselves to the acceptance of
such humiliating ecclesiastical conditions. The ultimate cause of the
catastrophe is, however, perhaps to be found in a progressive divergence
between the two cultures, in points of ethos and way of life, which had
begun to show itself seven hundred, or even a thousand, years earlier,
and which is illustrated on the ecclesiastical plane by the differentiation
between the Greek and Latin rites; for this diversity stimulated an anti¬
pathy that increased pari passu with it. An aggravating circumstance
was the sudden, unexpected, and sensational reversal of the tw'o sister
Christian societies’ relative strengths and prospects in the eleventh
century. 1

One of the consequences of this political and economic peripeteia
was that, from that time onwards, either party presented an insufferable
appearance in the other party’s eyes. In the sight of the Eastern Ortho¬
dox Christians the Franks were now parvenus who were cynically exploit¬
ing a superiority in brute force which had been undeservedly conferred
upon them by a preposterous latter-day freak of Fortune. In the sight
of the Western Christians the Byzantines were now mandarins w'hose
overweening pretensions were neither justified by merit nor backed by
force. To the Franks it seemed as monstrous that the Byzantines should
expect them to feel honoured at being given the opportunity of pulling
Greek chestnuts out of a Turkish fire as it seemed monstrous to the
Byzantines that the Franks should take advantage of the exhaustion of
an East Roman Empire which had spent its strength in bearing the brunt
of a battle in a common cause against a Muslim aggressor who was a
menace to Eastern and Western Christendom alike.

From the Eastern Orthodox Christian standpoint the eleventh-century
reversal of the relation between the two Christendoms was an inexcu¬
sable practical joke which a Byzantine pedant's literary conceit might
debit euphemistically to Clio, the pagan Hellenic Muse of History, as
an ingenious way out of the blasphemy of ascribing to the presumably
Orthodox God of Constantine and Justinian and Basil the Bulgar-
Slayer a gaffe which was not only supremely unjust but was also in
excruciatingly bad taste. In the preceding age the spectacle of a Western
Christendom wallowing in a poverty and an impotence which were the
wages of a sinful inclination towards Barbarism had been not unplcasing
for a Byzantine statesman or scholar to contemplate. The contrast be¬
tween his Latin poor relation’s misery and his own comparative state of
blessedness in This Life had given him the same sense of satisfaction
and self-assurance that either breed of Christian would have felt in that
epoch when he imagined himself in the Life to Come leaning over the
* Sec pp. 351-2, above.

382 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
balustrade of Heaven and feasting his eyes on the tortures of damned
personal acquaintances in Hell.

As an early-eleventh-century Byzantine student of history might have
seen it, his Latin contemporaries were then justly still being punished
for the sins of forefathers who, in the fifth century of the Christian Era,
had committed the moral and aesthetic solecism of parting company
with their fellow Orthodox Christians and fellow Roman citizens in
the Greek-speaking core of an Hellenic World embodied in the Roman
Empire, in order to fraternize with North European barbarians by
whom the Latin-speaking western fringes of the Roman Empire were
being overrun. From the Byzantine point of view the fifth-century
breakdown in those Latin-speaking provinces had revealed culpable
incompetence in so far as it had been involuntary, as well as cul¬
pable disloyalty in so far as it had been the expression of a preference
for chastisement by barbarian warlords’ whips to chastisement by im¬
perial tax-collectors’ scorpions. Yet, in the sequel, the tribulation which
the Latin secessionists from Civilization had brought upon themselves—
and had duly continued to bring upon themselves in the ludicrously
disastrous aftermath of Charlemagne’s naively presumptous usurpation
of the Roman Imperial Crown—was a punishment that had gratifyingly
fitted their crime, while on the other hand their secession, offensive
though it might be, had not inflicted any appreciable material damage
upon the intact Greek core of Romania and Christendom. Indeed, if the
implicit offence to Byzantium's amour propre and the impalpable damage
to her prestige could legitimately be discounted, she might consider
that she was positively the gainer in being relieved of responsibility for
a backward Latin fringe that had never been more than an excrescence
on the body social of the Hellenic Society and had latterly become not
merely an excrescence but an incubus.

This imaginary early-eleventh-century Byzantine appreciation of the
relations between Eastern Orthodox Christendom and the West up to
date would have required a painfully drastic revision before the century
was over. A comfortable attitude of meritorious and unchallengeable
superiority could now no longer plausibly be maintained towards once
poor relations who, overnight, had become nouveaux riches', and the
worst of it was that, all along, these Latin barbarians beyond the
Byzantine earthly paradise’s pale had been in possession of one ecclesias¬
tical and cultural asset whose supreme value the East Romans could not
dispute without impugning the title on which they based their own claim
to be the exclusive Heirs of the Promise of Hellenism and Christianity.

The Old Rome on the banks of the Tiber might be held to have
forfeited her political primacy to a New Rome, set on the shores of a
mightier stream, whose geographically manifest destiny to become the
capital of the World had been fulfilled by the historic act, and conse¬
crated by the immense authority, of the first Christian Roman Emperor.
Yet neither Constantine’s august genius nor Poseidon’s masterly creation
of the Bosphorus by a god’s mighty trident-stroke 1 could undo the
historic fact that the site of the Old Rome, however woefully devastated

1 See II. i. 325-6.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 383
it might be in terms of human power and pride, 1 was eternally hallowed
by the presence of the mortal remains of the two arch-apostles, Peter and
Paul, who had come to Rome to be martyred there owing to the accident
that this dcmi-Hcllenic Central Italian town happened to be the political
capital of the World in the Apostles day. 2 The numinous mana of a Rome
that was the sepulchre of Peter and Paul had retained all the potency
bequeathed by this second pair of discordant founders when the volatile
political power of the pagan Rome of Romulus and Remus had ebbed
away to Nicomedia and Constantinople and Milan and Ravenna and
Trier and Aachen. On the political plane a medieval Rome had been
degraded from being caput mundi to becoming a derelict frontier-post
on the borderline between two rival Christendoms; but in the course of
the eighth century of the Christian Era this ruin that had become a poli¬
tical liability had passed out of East Roman into Frankish hands, and in
consequence the earthly representative of the Prince of the Apostles had
become the President of a Western Christian commonwealth instead of
remaining an East Roman subject. The Eastern Patriarchates might
wince at being required to recognize the Papacy’s supremacy, but it was
difficult for them to deny that the Pope was at any rate primus inter pares
in the light of the Papacy’s indisputably decisive role in determining the
acts of oecumenical councils, culminating in the Council of Calchedon,
whose findings were the foundations of Eastern Orthodox, as well as
Western Catholic, theology.

Nor. was the Papacy’s eminence merely an echo of ancient history; it
was also a portentous living fact, as the East Roman Imperial Govern¬
ment had discovered through a costly experiment on the occasion of the
controversy over images in the eighth century. The Vatican had then
proved no longer amenable to the harsh political discipline which the
Emperor Justinian I had applied to Popes Silverius and Vigilius and the
Emperor Constans II to Pope Martin I, 3 and thereafter the East Roman
Imperial Government showed its flair for political realities by steadily
insisting, sometimes in the teeth of opposition on the part of at least one
faction in the Eastern Orthodox Church, upon treating the Papacy- with
the tactful consideration which it was only politic to show to a Great
Power. 4 The East Roman Government constantly pursued this concilia¬
tory policy towards the Vatican from the time of the conflict between
Pope Nicholas I and the Oecumenical Patriarch Photius ( flagrabat a.d.
862 5 -8o 6 ) down to the capture of Constantinople by the ‘Osmanlis in
a.d. 1453 ; 7 but, though the policy was never abandoned, the fateful

1 See the passage quoted from a sermon of Gregory the Great's in IV. iv. 60-61 and
VII. vii. 553.

* ‘Non cst a Graecis Romanua vilis tenendus locus quia recessit indc imperator Con-
stantinus, verum co magis colendus, venerandus, ndorandus quia vencrunt illuc Apo-
stoli, doctores sancti, Petrus et Paulus’ (Liutprand of Cremona: Relatio de Lcgattone
Conslanlinopolitartd, chip. Ixii).

J Sec IV. iv. 337. The East Roman Government ought to have taken warning from
the failure of its attempt in A.D. 693 to deal with Pope Sergius I as it had dealt with
Pope Martin I in a.d. 653. 4 Sec IV. iv. 604-16.

* See Dvomik, F.: The Photian Schism (Cambridge 1048, University Press), pp.

94-95. 6 Sec ibid., chap. 6, pp. 159-201.

’ No particularly remarkable statesmanship was required to inspire the eleventh-hour
attempts of the later Palaiol6ghi to come to terms with the Vatican at the price of

384 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
breach between the Oecumenical Patriarch and the Vatican in a . d . 1054
marked the beginning of the end of its effectiveness. Down to that date
the East Roman Imperial Government had usually proved strong enough
to impose its philopapal will on an antipapal faction in the Eastern
Orthodox Church; from Cerularius’s day onwards this faction in the
Eastern Orthodox Church usually proved strong enough, when it chose,
to repudiate and thereby nullify successive ententes between the East
Roman Imperial Government and the Papacy. 1

The more and more fanatically intransigent opposition to an ecclesias¬
tical reunion with Rome which was displayed by the clergy and people
of Eastern Orthodox Christendom after the final breach in a . d . 1182-
1204 was the effect, not only of a reversal of fortune, but also of an
increasing cultural antipathy which was reciprocated by a contempor¬
aneous increase in the corresponding hostile feelings on the Western
Christian side. In Byzantine eyes the Franks were impertinent, un¬
mannerly, and truculent; in Frankish eyes the Byzantines were preten¬
tious, pedantic, and perfidious. Out of the copious medieval Greek and
Latin literature illustrating the Franks’ and Byzantines’ unedifying
mutual dislike and hostility, we must be content in this place to cite
a few illuminating passages from one representative spokesman on
either side. As evidence of the Franks’ prejudice against the Byzantines
we may quote a report 2 by the Lombard bishop Liutprand of Cremona
(vivebat circa a . d . 920-72) on a diplomatic mission to the East Roman
Imperial Court at Constantinople which he had carried out on behalf of
his Saxon master the West Roman Emperor Otto II in a.d. 968-9, when
the East Roman Empire was at its zenith. 3 As evidence of the Byzantine

acknowledging the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Papacy over the Eastern Orthodox
Churches. The breach of all diplomatic precedent that was committed by the Emperor
John Palaioldghos I in a.d. 1369, when he paid a personal visit to Pope Urban V at Rome
as a suppliant, was prompted by the no less unprecedented change for the worse in the
military and political situation of a precariously restored East Roman Empire since the
reduction of Constantinople to an enclave, entirely surrounded by Ottoman territory,
as a result of Sultan Mur 3 d I’a conquest of Adnanoplc in a.d. rj6r. The Emperor
Manuel Palaioldghos’s visic to the Courts of France and England in a . d . 1400-2 was
similarly prompted by the permanent blockade to which Constantinople had been sub
jeeted by Sultan Biyezid I since a.d. 1391, and the Emperor John Palaioldghos Il's
visit to Italy in a.d. 1437-p, which bore fruit in the negotiation of the ecclesiastical Union
of Florence, by a lively fear of a repetition of the abortive siege of Constantinople by
Sultan Murid II in A.D. 1412. On the other hand, when the founder of the dynasty, the
Emperor Michael Palaioldghos, had negotiated the first of the scries of ecclesiastical
unions in a.d. 1274 (see IV. iv. 615-16), the antecedent event that had prompted him
had not been a disaster, but had been the brilliant success of his capture of Constanti¬
nople from the last of the usurping Latin emperors in a.d. 1261. Michael's concern was,
not to retrieve a misfortune, but to forestall a revanche, and, in taking so momentous a
step before being forced to take it by accomplished facts, he was showing vision as well
as courage of the highest order.

« For the change in the Balance of Power between the East Roman Imperial Govern¬
ment and the Orthodox Church, to the Church’s advantage, in and after the eleventh
century of the Christian Era, see IV. iv. 6x2-23.

1 Liutprandi Rtlatio de Legation Constantinopoiitand.

3 This was not Liutprand's only excursion on to Orthodox Christian ground. One
of his earliest undertakings as a young man had been a mission to Constantinople in
A.D. 940 ( imperante Constantino VII Porphyrogenito ) on behalf of the North Italian
prince Berengar of Ivrea (Liutprandi Opera, edited by Becker, J.: 3rd cd. (Hanover
and Leipzig 1915, Hahn), p. viri), and he may also have been a member of the mission
sent to Constantinople by Otto II in A.D. 971, (ibid., p. xii). A brief and, on the whole,
courteous account of the mission of a.d. 949 is given by Liutprand in his history of his
own times ( Antapodosis , Book VI, chaps. 3-10).

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 385
prejudice against the Franks, we may quote the Greek princess-
historian Anna Comnena’s history of the reign of her father the East
Roman Emperor Alexius I (imperabat a.d. 1081-11x8), who became
disagreeably well acquainted with the Franks through having to cope
first with the Normans’ attempt to conquer the East Roman Empire in
the war of a.d. 1081-5 an< ^ then with the Crusaders’ transit across his
dominions in a.d. 1096-7—a visitation which caused the Emperor more
anxiety than the Normans’ previous undisguised aggression, since the
foiled but impenitent Norman aggressors were now claiming rcadmit-
tance, in the company of a host of adventurers recruited from other
Western Christian barbarian tribes, in the novel and unconvincing guise
of the East Romans’ allies and champions.

Bishop Liutprand’s official anxieties and adversities in the difficult
diplomatic task with which he had been entrusted were aggravated by
his personal disgust with all the incidental details of daily life in the
Orthodox Christendom of his day. The palace assigned to him was so
inconsiderately exposed to the elements that it was always either too
hot or too cold. 1 What hateful quarters! 2 And they were so far from the
Emperor’s palace—to which he was made to walk, and was not allowed
to ride—that he always arrived out of breath. 3 In these odious apart¬
ments the Ambassador and his suite were kept insulated by security
police. 4 Even his Greek-speaking dragoman was not allowed out to buy
provisions, and he had to send to market a cook who knew no Greek and
who was shamelessly cheated over the purchases which he was forced to
make by dumb-show. 5 The pitch and gypsum with which the Greek
wine provided for him was doctored made it undrinkable, 6 and drinking-
water could not be had except for cash. 7 As for the food, it was as horrid
as the wine and as scarce and expensive 8 as the water. The Lombard
bishop could not stomach the highly seasoned fare that was served to
him at the East Roman imperial table; 6 but he also disdained the plain
Greek biscuit ( paximadhi) which was all that the poverty-stricken
eunuch-bishop of Lefkddha had to offer him 10 (‘in the whole of Greece’,
Liutprand declares, ‘I have not found one single hospitable bishop’)."
In the hateful quarters in the capital the officer responsible for providing
Liutprand and his party with their daily subsistence allowance was a
devil. 12 The beds, too, were stone-hard, without mattress or pillow." The
Emperor’s procession to celebrate the opening of a new regnal year was
tawdry. 14 In short, everyone of the Ambassador’s 120 days 15 in the New
Rome was a torment; 16 and, after taking a school-boy’s revenge on his
hosts by scrawling a screed of abusive Latin hexameters on the walls and
table, 17 he rejoiced to see the last of 'that once opulent and flourishing
but now famine-stricken, perjured, lying, deceitful, rapacious, covetous,
miserly, empty-headed city’ 18 —only to suffer a further martyrdom on a

1 Legatio, chap. x. 1 Ibid., chaps. 13. 19, and 24. * Chap. x.

* Chaps, x, 26, and 29. » Chap. 46. 6 Chaps, x and 13.

~ Chap. x. * Chaps. 34 and 44. « Chaps. 20 and 32.

10 Chap. 63. 11 Ibid. 12 Chap. 1. «» Chap. 13.

** Chaps. 9-10. ** 4th June to 2nd October, A.D. 968.

> 6 Chaps. 1 and 46. 17 Chap. 57.

14 Chap. 58.

B 2898 .VUI

3 86 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
seven-weeks’ journey 1 overland from Constantinople to Lepanto 2 in
which he had to pay an exorbitant price to his courier (dhiasostis) for
the hire of pack-horses which the Imperial Government had omitted
to provide. 3

Equally exasperating—and this to both parties—were the chronic dis¬
putes over childish points of protocol which exacerbated Byzantino-
Frankish relations for centuries. Liutprand was indignant with the
Emperor Nikiphdros’s brother, the Kouropalitis and Grand Logothete
Leo, for referring to Liutprand’s own master, Otto, not as ‘emperor’
(BaaiXtvs) but as ‘king’ (pfjt),* while Nikiphoros spoke with displeasure
of Otto’s ‘intolerable, unmentionable’ presumption in styling himself
‘emperor’. s The East Roman Imperial Court was still more incensed
when a mission arrived from the Pope of the day 6 bearing a letter
addressed to ‘the Emperor of the Greeks’. 7 Questions of precedence
proved as painful as questions of style and title. After having been
seated fifteen places away from the Emperor at one banquet, 8 Liutprand
left the room when, at another banquet, he found himself placed below
a Bulgar envoy ‘with his head cropped like a Hungarian and a brass
chain doing duty for a belt’. Kouropaldtis Leo and First Secretary
Simeon ran after the retreating Ambassador shouting at him that the
Bulgarian envoy enjoyed precedence over all other foreign ambassadors
by treaty' right, and that the present envoy, in spite of his cropped head,
unwashed body, and brass chain, was nevertheless a patrician and must
therefore take precedence over a bishop—particularly over a bishop who
was also a Frank. They would not allow Liutprand to come back, but
dismissed him to take his dinner in the servants’ hall; 5 and another
time, on a hunting party, they dismissed him from the imperial park for
his breach of etiquette in wearing a cap instead of a hat in the Emperor’s
presence. 10 Before the ambassador’s departure from Constantinople, the
imperial authorities gave him a further lesson in the low esteem in which
they held the Franks by compulsorily repurchasing from him five purple
robes of state which Liutprand had bought during his stay in Constanti¬
nople but which the authorities now declared to be of the category
scheduled as ‘too good for export’ ( KOi\v 6 p(va )."

Liutprand’s conversations with the Emperor Nikiphoros and his
ministers were enlivened on both sides by sallies that were occasionally
pointed but more often merely vituperative. 12 Liutprand’s own most
telling shot was that ‘it was the Greeks who bred heresies, and the
Westerners who killed them; MJ and at a state banquet on the 7th June,
968, the inflammatory word ‘Romans’ kindled into flame the perpetually

’ 2nd October to 20th November, a.d. 968. * Chap. 58.

1 Chap. 57. 4 Chap. 2. s Chap. 25. 6 Chaps. 47 and 50.

1 Chap. 47. When the East Roman officials took Liutprand to task over this, he

£ ye them, according to his own account, the following malicious explanation: ‘The
pc, in his noble simplicity, was intending to pay the Emperor a compliment, ar.d not
to insult him, by giving him this title. We are well aware that Constantine the Emperor
of the Romans came here with the Roman Army and founded this city that is named after
him; but, since you have changed your language, your manners and customs, and your
dress, His Holiness inferred that you disliked being called Romans as much as you dis¬
liked wearing Roman clothes’ (chap. 51).

8 Chap. ix. • Chap. 19. 10 Chap. 37. » Chaps. 53-55.

12 See, for example, chaps. 37, 45, and 53. u Chap. 22.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 387
smouldering resentment between the representatives of the two
Christendoms.

‘Nikiphdros refused to give me a chance of replying to him, and added
insultingly: “You are not Romans; you are Lombards!” He wanted to
go on, and motioned to me to be silent, but I lost my temper and took the
floor. “It is a notorious historical fact,” I declared, “that Romulus, after
whom the Romans arc called, was a fratricide and a son of a whore—
born, I mean, out of lawful wedlock—and that he set up an Alsatia for
defaulting debtors, fugitive slaves, murderers, and perpetrators of other
capital offences. He harboured these criminals, collected a crowd of them,
and called them “Romans”. This is the fine aristocracy from which your
emperors, or KoanoKparopts as you call them, arc descended. But we—
and by "us” I mean us Lombards, Saxons, Frenchmen, Lorrainers, Bava¬
rians, Swabians, Burgundians—we despise the Romans so utterly that,
when we lose our tempers with our enemies, the one word “Roman!” is
all that we have to utter, because, in our parlance, this single bad name
embraces the whole gamut of meanness, cowardice, avarice, decadence,
untruthfulness and all the other vices.

Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, 2 and, in
provoking Liutprand into losing his temper, Nikiphoros had stung his
Latin guest into proclaiming his sense of solidarity with his Teutonic¬
speaking fellow Westerners in a common antipathy against all ‘Romans’.
In a later and more genial conversation at the imperial dinner table,
Nikiphdros used the word ‘Franks’ to include Latins as well as Teutons; 3
and this usage had been justified in advance by Liutprand’s revealing
outburst. Though Liutprand was a Latin of the Latins in his intellectual
culture—being as well versed as any Western scholar of his day in the
Latin version of the classical Hellenic literature—a common Hellenic
cultural background had not bred in Liutprand’s heart any feeling of
affinity with the contemporary Greek heirs of the same Hellenic heritage.
Between this tenth-century Italian and these tenth-century Greeks a
great emotional gulf was already fixed, whereas there was no gulf of the
kind between Liutprand and his Saxon employers—W'hosc kinsman he
instinctively felt himself to be, in virtue of his own Lombard descent
and Teutonic name, though his intrusive barbarian ancestors had not
taken long to make themselves at home in Italy by forgetting how to
speak their original Teutonic mother tongue. From the Byzantine stand-

K >int this incurably barbarian-hearted Latin was a renegade from the
ellenic culture into which he had been initiated (even though only at
second hand); and, at the first audience given to Liutprand by Niki-

1 Chap. :2. The contempt which Liutprand professed to feel for ‘Romans’ was
felt by the East Roman Court for the City of Rome, in contrast to Constantinople.
‘"Look here", they said: "This fatuous, vulgar Pope of yours is ignorant of the historic
fact that I Jis Sacred Majesty Constantine transferred the imperial sceptre from Rome
to this city—and, with it, all the Senate nnd the whole of the Roman Army—and left at
Rome nothing but vile bodies: creatures such as fishermen, pimps, fowlers, bastards,
proletarians and slaves’” (ibid., chap. 51). Presumably they forgot, in making this
extempore exposition of the Byzantine case, that one of the fishermen whom Constantine
had left behind in the Old Rome had been no less a person that the Prince of the
Apostles. Presumably, too, this crushing retort did not occur to Liutprand either; for,
if he had thought of it, he would certainly have put it on record.

1 Matt. xii. 34. * Sec Legatio, chap. 33.

3S8 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
phdros, ihc Emperor did not hesitate to accuse the Ambassador of having
been sent by his Saxon employer Otto as a spy. 1

Liutprand took his revenge by painting a verbal portrait of the
Emperor—in a document that would never reach Nikiphdros’s eyes and
in a language that he did not understand—which was as unflattering as
malice could make it.

‘The man is a freak, a dwarf, with a great fat head and little mole’s
eyes. He is disfigured by a stubby, broad, thick, piebald beard sprouting
from a neck as thin as my finger. He has a porcine mop of bristly hair, and
he is as black as a nigger—"the sort of fellow you would not care to meet
after dark”. 1 He is pot-bellied, lean in the backside, too long in the thigh
for so short a man, but also too spindly in the shanks. His heels stick out
as far as his toes. He wears an old shabby linen uniform, dirty and faded
with age, and women’s shoes (sicyoniis calceamentis). He has a wagging
tongue, a foxy character, and the unscrupulous untruthfulness of a
Ulysses.’*

This portrait is a recognizable caricature of authentic descriptions and
pictures of Nikiphdros; 4 and it is also true that the Emperor’s own
countrymen, as well as the Lombard stranger, were apt to fall foul
of him. 5 His tragic death, in the year following Liutprand’s encounter
with him, through a conspiracy between his wife and a paramour who
had been her husband’s trusted comrade-in-arms, was a reflection upon
the character of the victim as well as upon that of his murderers. Yet
the Western bishop’s utter failure to detect the magnificent soldier
and the blue-blooded aristocrat beneath this East Roman Emperor’s
plain and unattractive exterior gives the measure of the blinding animus
against all things Byzantine by which Liutprand was obsessed, while
the measure of the Byzantine Society’s superiority over the contempor¬
ary Franks in cultivation is given by the contrast between Liutprand’s
crudely virulent caricature of Nikiphdros and the objective and dis¬
criminating verbal portrait, from the hand of the East Roman historian-
princess Anna Comnena, 6 of the Norman adventurer Bohcmond, a
blond beast whose pugnacity, treachcrousness, and ambition had given
far more trouble to Anna’s father and hero the East Roman Emperor
Alexius I than the East Roman Emperor Nikiphdros II’s brusqueness
had ever given to Liutprand’s master the West Roman Emperor Otto.
A minute description of the physique of this corporeally magnificent
specimen of Nordic Man—‘whose build reproduced the proportions
of the canon of Polycleitus’—is prefaced by Anna with a generous
encomium.

1 Chap. 4. * Juvenal: Satin V, 11 . 53-54.

* Chap. 3: cp. chaps. 10, 23, 28, and 40.

* See Hahn, ad loc. , n. 5 on p. 177 of his edition of Liutprand’s works.

5 The difference in character between the aggressive soldier Nikiphdros and the
gentle scholar Constantine Porphyrogenitus was pointed out to Liutprand by the im¬
perial officials when he complained that the permission to export robes of state of the
first quality, which was now being refused to him when he was a bishop and an ambas¬
sador representing an emperor, had been granted to him on his previous mission to
Constantinople in Constantine Porphyrogcnitus's reign, when Liutprand had been
merely a deacon and an envoy representing a prince (chap. 53).

6 In her AUxiad, cd. by Reitferschcid, A. (Leipzig 1884, Teubner, 2 vols.), Book XIII,
chap, to-

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 389

‘The like of him was not to be seen in all Romania. There was not a
barbarian or a Hellene there who could measure up to him. He was not only
a marvel to behold; he was a legendary figure whose mere description took
your breath away.’

The sting in the Byzantine authoress’ picture of this Frankish human
tiger lies in the tail.

'Nature had given an outlet through his heroic nostrils for the mighty
spirit boiling up from his heart—for it must be confessed that there was
something attractive about the man’s countenance, though the effect of
this was marred by the intimidating impression which the whole ensemble
conspired to convey. The mercilessness of a beast of prey was writ large
over the whole man in every limb of his body; it was betrayed by some¬
thing about his look, in combination with the mightiness of his frame, and
also by his laugh, which smote other people’s ears like a lion’s roar. His
spiritual and physical complexion was such that ferocity and lust were
always rampant in him, and both these passions were perpetually seeking
vent in war. His intelligence was versatile, unscrupulous, and slippery;
and in verbal encounters he was completely master of his words and never
gave his adversary a handle in shaping his answers.’ 1

* The aversion with which Bohemond’s character inspired Anna, in despite of her
admiration for the magnificence of his physique, was the usual feeling evoked by the
Normans in the hearts of their East Roman victims. The hatred which they aroused was
indeed, in general, so bitter that the Byzantine historians delighted to confound them
with the Muslims under the generic opprobrious nickname ‘children of Hagnr’. Yet there
was at least one Norman adventurer who, unlike Bohemond, succeeded in winning the
affection, as well as the admiration, of the East Romans on whom he imposed himself.

Russell was a Norman soldier of fortune who had served with the Emperor Romania
Dhioyinis in a.d. 1071 in the campaign against the Saljuqs that had ended at Melazkcrd
(Attalciitis; Historia, cd. by Bckkcr, I. (Bonn x853, Weber), p. 148). The collapse of the
East Roman army and administration in Anatolia tempted the Norman adventurer to
play for his own hand. He collected a band of Frankish men-at-arms; ensconced himself
in the Armeniac army corps district in North-Eastern Anatolia; was taken prisoner by
the Turks and was ransomed by his wife (Attaleiitis, op. cit., p. 193); but was eventually
taken prisoner by them for the second time through the treachery of a Turkish war¬
lord named Tutikh, who, after having given Russella safe-conduct, secretly sold him to
Alexius Comnenus, who had been sent by the Emperor Michael VII Dhoukas (impera-
bat a.d. 1071-8) to capture Russell by fair means or foul (Attaleiitis, op. cit., pp. 199 -
zoo and 206; Vryinnios, Historiae, pp. 85-87). Tutikh duly seized Russell and handed
him over to Alexius in exchange for hostages whom Tutikh was to hold pending the
payment of his stipulated price (Vryinnios, op. cit., p. 87). But neither Alexius nor the
Emperor Michael—who had preferred, as Attalciitis puts it (op. cit., p. 199), to see
the East Roman Empire in the hands of the Turks rather than to see one piece of East
Roman territory defended against the Turks by this Latin soldier—had reckoned with
the local popularity that Russell had acquired. When Alexius called a meeting of the
local notables at Amasia to ask them to advance him the money to pay Tutakh’s price
for Russell, against a promise of a refund from the Imperial Treasury, there was an
uproar. 'They shouted that Russell had never done them any harm, and they tried to
snatch him from the house where he was under arrest, and to set him at liberty* (Vryin-
nios, op. cit., p. 89). Alexius extricated himself from these straits by ‘a trick that was as
humane as it was clever*. He induced Russell to go into collusion with him in making
a show of putting out Russell’s eyes. The executioner went through the motions;
Russell acted his part by duly bellowing and groaning; and, when he was displayed to
the people of Amasia next morning ns a blind man with a bandage over his eyes, ‘this
comedy effectively quelled the disturbance* (ibid., pp. 90-91). However, on the road
to Constantinople with his prisoner, Alexius got into trouble with his cousin Theodoro
Dhokeiands, at whose country house the party stopped to break their journey, 'for having
blinded such a fine fellow, and one who might have done so much to retrieve East Roman
fortunes'. Alexius amused himself by keeping his cousin mystified till after luncheon,
when he made him take the bandage off from Russell’s eyes. Theodore was overjoyed
to find that, after all, Russell’s eyesight was undamaged, and he congratulated Alexius
on the adroitness of his play-acting (ibid., pp. 92-93)*

It is manifest that Russell had won the sympathies, not only of a provincial Greek

390 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

This fascinating delineation of one of the arch-Franks of Anna’s day*
is almost equalled in vividness by a panorama of Frankdom in the mass
which she introduces as an overture to her account of the descent of the
First Crusade upon Orthodox Christendom.

‘Intelligence of the approach of innumerable Frankish armies gave the
Emperor Alexius considerable anxiety. He was only too familiar with the
Franks’ uncontrollable 1 impetuosity , 3 fickleness of mind 4 and suggesti¬
bility, and with the other inveterate characteristics, primary and second¬
ary, of the Western Barbarians (KrXroi). He was likewise familiar with the
insatiable covetousness that has made these barbarians a by-word for the
light-heartedness with which they take any excuse for tearing up treaties.
This was the Franks’ standing reputation, and it was completely confirmed
by their acts. ... The event proved to be even more portentous and more
fearful than the anticipations. It turned out that the entire West, including
all the tribes of the barbarians living between the west coast of the Adriatic
and the Straits of Gibraltar, had started a mass migration 5 and was on
the march, bag and baggage, for Asia through the intervening parts of
Europe .’ 6

The most sorely trying of the afflictions which the Emperor Alexius
suffered from the passage of the First Crusade was the unlimited call
which these unwelcome and obtusely inconsiderate visitors made upon
the precious time of a hard-worked administrator.

‘From crack of dawn, or at least from sunrise, Alexius made it his prac¬
tice to sit on the imperial throne 7 and to let it be known that every- Western
Barbarian who desired an audience with him could have unrestricted
access to his presence every day in the week. His motives were the imme¬
diate one of wishing to give them the opportunity of presenting their
requests and the ulterior one of using the divers opportunities that con-

Orthodox population that was already alienated from the East Roman imperial regime,
but of the two sophisticated Byzantine men of letters who recorded the story; and this
episode in the history of Graeco-Frankish relations shows that it was not impossible
for personal charm to outweigh cultural antipathy.

1 The same capacity for seeing the light as well as the shadow in the figure presented
by an alien enemy is shown by Anna in her talc of the Latin fighting priest. Though
the combatancy of the Latin priests is shocking to her, she feels, and conveys, the pathos
of this warrior-cleric’s death in battle ( Alexiad, Book X, chap. 8).

1 Cp. Alexiad, Book X, chap. 5, ad fin.: ‘The Western Barbarians make the impres¬
sion of being always hot-headed and vehement and of becoming utterly irrepressible
when once they have committed themselves to an adventure.’

5 Cp. ibid., Book X, chap. 6: 'When the impulse seizes them to embark on a raid,
they throw reason to the winds and become quite unbridled.’

4 Cp. ibid., Book X, chap. 11: The Emperor was aware of the Latins’ proneness to
change their minds.’

* The innumerable Frankish host was appropriately preceded in its advance by a
likewise innumerable swarm of locusts ( Alexiad , Book X, chap. 5).

6 Alexiad, Book X, chap.

7 At one of Alexius’s conferences with the leaders of the Crusade 'a Frankish baron
had the audacity to scat himself on the Emperor's camp stool. The Emperor put up with
this without saying a word—being familiar, as he was, with the overbearingness of the
Latin character—but Count Baldwin came up, seized the fellow by the hand, and pulled
him off the chair’—with the admonition that, as the Crusaders had now become the
Emperor’s liegemen, it was incumbent on them to observe the custom of the country*,
which debarred the Emperor’s subjects from sitting down in the imperial presence, even
when the Emperor himself was seated. 'The baron answered Baldwin never a word; but,
transfixing the Emperor with a savage stare, he muttered to himself in his own verna¬
cular: “That just shows what a boor the man isl Fancy his monopolising the right to a
chair with so many famous captains on their feet all round him’” ( Alexiad , Book X,
chap. 10).

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 391

vcrsation with them would offer to him for influencing them in the
direction of his own policy. These Western Barbarian barons have some
awkward national characteristics—an impudence, 1 an impetuosity, a
covetousness, a lack of self-control in indulging any lust that seizes them,
and, last but not least, a garrulousness—for which they hold the World’s
record; and they showed a typical lack of discipline in their abuse of the
Emperor’s accessibility.

‘Each baron brought with him into the imperial presence as many re¬
tainers as he fancied, and one followed at another’s heels, and a third at
the second’s heels, in a continuous queue. Worse still, when they held the
floor they did not set themselves any time-limit for their talk, such as the
Attic orators used to have to observe. Each Tom, Dick, and Harry took
just as much time as he chose for his talk with the Emperor. Being what
they were—with their inordinately wagging tongues and their entire lack
of respect for the Emperor, lack of sense of time, and lack of sensitivity
to the indignation of the officials in attendance—they none of them
thought of leaving any time over for those behind them in the queue; they
just went on talking and making demands interminably.

‘The volubility and mercenarincss and banality of the Western Bar¬
barians’ talk are, of course, notorious to all students of national characters;
but first-hand experience has given a more thorough education in the
Western Barbarians’ character to those who have had the misfortune to
be present on these occasions. When dusk descended on the proceedings,
the unfortunate Emperor—who had laboured through the live-long day
without a chance of breaking his fast—would rise from his throne and
make a motion in the direction of his private apartments; but even this
broad hint did not avail to extricate him from being pestered by the
Barbarians. They would go on jockeying for priority with one another—
and this game was played not only by those who were still left in the queue;
those who had already had their audience during the day would now- keep
on coming back and bringing up one pretext after another for speaking
to the Emperor again, while the poor man was being kept on his feet and
was having to put up with this babel of chatter from the swarm of bar¬
barians thronging round him. The affability with which this one devoted
victim kept on responding to the interpellations of the multitude was a
sight to see, and the unseasonable chatter had no end to it; for, whenever
one of the chamberlains tried to shut the barbarians up, he would find
himself shut up, instead, by the Emperor, who was aware of the Franks’
proneness to lose their tempers 1 and was afraid of some trifling provoca¬
tion producing an explosion that might inflict the gravest injury on the
Roman Empire.

'The scene was really most extraordinary. The Emperor w r ould stand
as stalwartly as if he were a wrought-metal statue made of, say, bronze
or wrought iron, and he would maintain this posture till any hour in the
night—sometimes from dusk till midnight, sometimes till the third cock¬
crow, sometimes almost till the Sun’s beams became distinctly visible
again. The courtiers could none of them stay the course; they used to
withdraw for a rest and then return to the presence thoroughly out of
temper. None of the Emperor’s lords in waiting could compete with him
in standing for that length of time without a change of position. All of

1 If an equivalent of the American word ‘brash’ had existed in Anna's Romaic Greek
mother tongue, she would have been sorely tempted to blot her Classical Neo-Attic
copy-book by breaking out, at this point, into the living language of her day.

* ‘Experience proved them to be chronically stiff-necked and sour-tempered’ ( Alexiad ,
Book XIV, chap. 2).

392 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
them would keep on shifting their weight from one leg to the other, while
one would sink into a sitting posture, another would droop his head on
one side and rest it on his shoulder, and a third would lean against the
wall. The Emperor alone made no concessions whatever to this extremity
of physical fatigue. It is really impossible to do justice in words to his
endurance. In these conversazioni of his with the million, each of his
interlocutors chattered to excess. It was like the endless jackdaw mono¬
logue of the Homeric Thcrsitcs. 1 And when one interlocutor withdrew
he would yield the floor to another, and the second to a third, and so on
and so on. These interlocutors of the Emperor’s had only to stand at
intervals, whereas the Emperor had to stay on his feet interminably—till
the first cockcrow, or even the second. And then, after the briefest inter¬
lude of repose, at the return of sunrise he would be on his throne again,
with another day of hard labour and ordeals—perhaps twice as severe as
the last—following at the heels of the labours of the preceding night.’ 1

The gout to which Alexius was a martyr is ascribed by his daughter to
the effects of these stances with the importunate Western Barbarians
rather than to an injury to his knee-cap which the Emperor had sustained
during a game of polo. 3

A mutual antipathy of this intensity, which eventually exploded into
hideous action in the atrocities of a.d. 1182 and 1185 and 1204, might
have been expected to rule out any possibility of mutual cultural in¬
fluence; yet the Crusades did bear fruit in Franco-Byzantine, as well as
Franco-Armcnian and Franco-Muslim, interchanges of cultural goods.

After acquiring from the Muslims in the twelfth century of the
Christian Era the philosophical and scientific abstract from the corpus
of Hellenic literature that had been translated by Oriental hands from the
original Greek into Syriac and Arabic, 4 the Medieval Western Christians
tardily completed their Hellenic literary repertory by acquiring the
originals of all the surviving works of Hellenic literature in Ancient
Greek from the Medieval Greek Orthodox Christian carriers of this
precious cargo on the very eve of the extinction of the political indepen¬
dence of the last enclaves of the East Roman Empire in an Orthodox
Christendom that was being united politically at last under a Pax
Ottomanica. This literary debt of the West to Orthodox Christendom 5 is
more notorious, but less remarkable, than the Medieval Greek Orthodox
Christians’ cultural debt to the, in their eyes, still ‘barbarian’ Medieval
Western intruders.

It is one of the surprises of History that the romantic vein in the way
of life of Frankish knights and barons whose prosaic barbarism had
proved such a plague to the East Roman Emperor Alexius I Comnenus

' Iliad, Book II, 1. 212. * Altxiad, Book XIV, chap. 4 -

> See ibid. * See pp. 371-3, above.

1 Whether the Western school of painting can be said to be indebted for its inspira¬
tion to Byzantine Art is a more debatable question. The response that a Byzantine
challenge evoked from Giotto and his successors was. not to imitate the Byzantine hieratic
style, but to break away from it into a naturalistic style that was its antithesis. If a
Western debt was ever incurred in the artistic commerce between the West and Byzan¬
tium, the Byzantine painter to whose account this debt must be credited is the Cretan
Dhomfnikos Thcotokdpoulos'El Greco' (see IV. iv. 360-1), whose shattering Byzantine
impact on a, by his time, mature and already over-ripe naturalistic Modem Western
style began to produce its effects some three hundred years and more after the Byzantine
artist-revolutionary's death in a.d. 1614.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 93
in a.d. 1096 should have come to exercise a powerful attraction on his
grandson and second successor Manuel (imperabat a.d. i 143-80);' and it
is still more noteworthy that, when, after this Francophil East Roman
Emperor’s death, a Francophobc reaction among the Empire’s Greek
Orthodox Christian subjects precipitated the Empire’s second and, this
time, irretrievable, collapse, the thirteenth-century Frankish conquerors
of Constantinople and the Morea should have done their Greek victims
the same unintentional but signal literary service that the contemporary
Mongol conquerors of China likewise inadvertently performed for the
Chinese. In China the temporary dethronement of the Confucian
littcrati under a barbarian-administered regime 1 2 gave a belated oppor¬
tunity for a submerged popular literature in the living vernacular
language to rise to the surface of Chinese social life, where it had never
been allowed to make this shocking display of its vitality under the
culturally repressive rule of Confucian-minded Chinese civil servants
who were incurably devoted slaves of the Sinic literary classics. 3 In a
barbarian-ridden Orthodox Christendom the same cause produced the
same effect on a minor scale; and the new genres of popular literature—
the drama and the novel—that came to flower in China in the Yuan Age
had their counterparts in Medieval Greece under Frankish rule in the
flowering of a popular lyric and epic poetry that had already been
foreshadowed in the epic of the ninth-century East Roman borderer-
barbarians who had broken into the domain of a disintegrating ‘Abbasid
Caliphate, 4 and that was to be echoed in the ballads of the nineteenth-
century Greek ra'iyeh brigand-patriot insurgents against the domination
of a disintegrating Ottoman Empire. 5

Since the twelfth century of the Christian Era the Franks, in their
homelands in Western Christendom, had been breaking out of the
chrysalis of a traditional literary style, conveyed in the vehicle of the
Latin language, which was the Western literary heritage from an ante¬
cedent Hellenic culture, and had been expressing themselves in new
forms in the French, Provengal, Tuscan, Castilian, High German,

1 Manuel, in his infatuation with Frankish chivalry, threw to the winds all the wcll-
considcrcd traditional East Roman scientific military doctrine of equipment and tactics—
to which his admiring historian John Kinnamoa pays lip-service {Hiitoriae, edited by
Meineke, A. (Bonn 1836, Weber), pp. 16S-9). Though East Roman professional soldiers
were critical of the Frankish knights’ excessive weight of body armour, which reduced
their chargers’ speed, as well as of their lack of discipline (Kinnamos, op. cit., d. 73),
Manuel celebrated his accession to the imperial throne by converting the East Roman
cavalry from Avar horse-archers with round targets into Frankish lancers with kite-
shaped shields (ibid., p. 12s; cp. Khoniatis, Nikitas: Khronihi Dhiiyisii, edited by
Bekkcr, I. (Bonn 1835, Weber), p. 234), and he could seldom resist the temptation to
exchange the role of an East Roman general for that of a Frankish champion charging
recklessly into the blue. Kinnamos records (op. cit., p. 192) that he hod been incredulous
of the reports of Manuel’s personal deeds of prowess till he had witnessed some of them
with his own eyes. One of the happiest events in Manuel’s life must have been hi*
participation, at Antioch in A.D. 1150, in a grand tournament, described by Nikitas
(op. cit., pp. 141-4). on the occasion of his state visit as the local Norman prince's feudal
overlord.

2 The Mongols’ audacious attempt to administer the Middle Kingdom through the
agency of barbarian officials imported from Dar-al-IslSm and Western Christendom has
been touched upon in V. v. 349-51.

1 The Archaism that had already fastened upon the Sinic literature before the days
of Confucius has been noticed in V. vi. 82-83.

* See V. v. 252-9.

B 2898. vm O 2

J Sec V. v. 297-8.

394 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

and other living local Western vernaculars of the day; and the Romaic
Greek language is indebted for its principal literary' monument dating
from the fourteenth century to an anonymous Moreot Frankish poet
of the third or fourth generation after the Frankish conquest, who wrote
The Chronicle of the Morea in the living Greek that was the author’s
mother tongue, as unselfconsciously as he would have written it in
French if he had happened to have been born and brought up in the land
of his forefathers in the domain of the Languc d’Oil instead of overseas
in a Greek-speaking colonial annex of Medieval Western Christendom.

Had this Morcot-bred chronicler been a clerk of native Moreot and not
of exotic Frankish lineage, it would have been far more difficult for him
—paradoxical though this may sound—to use the same living Romaic
Greek tongue as a vehicle for literary composition; for, in the Byzantine
cultural environment, he would have been drilled so rigorously in the
Attic masterpieces and Neo-Attic conceits of a classical Greek literature
that he would have become morally incapable of using his living mother
tongue for any purpose higher than the vulgar demands of practical daily
life. The Moreot Frankish author of The Chronicle of the Morea was also
a cultivated man in his own tradition, as the internal evidence of his
poem reveals. The subject in which this Western clerk was learned was,
however, not Ancient Greek literature but Medieval French feudal law, 1
while his classical Hellenic language was not Attic Greek but Latin; and
the freedom, which was this Moreot Frank’s birthright, from the Byzan¬
tine incubus of an Attic Greek literary education enabled an alien enemy
to endow the Romaic Greek language with a chronicle in the native
accentual verse which local Greek hands afterwards supplemented and
revised.

The most momentous of all the gifts exchanged between a Medieval
Western Christendom and a contemporary Eastern Orthodox Christen¬
dom was the political institution of the absolute authoritarian state,
which in Orthodox Christendom had been successfully disinterred from
the sepulchre of a dead Hellenic past by the genius of Leo Syrus some
two generations before Charlemagne made his abortive attempt in the
West to perform the same tour de force of political necromancy. This

C tersely effective Orthodox Christian revival of an institution that had
n a disintegrating Hellenic Society’s last desperate political resort
had been communicated to the West as a going concern in the Western
successor-state which eleventh-century Norman swords had carved out
of the East Roman Empire’s former dominions in Apulia and Sicily; 2
and a Byzantine ideal of autocracy, which had been no more than a
curiosity of Medieval Western institutional history- so long as it had
been confined to one recently acquired and still outlandish frontier
province of Western Christendom, became a cynosure of all Western
eyes—whether they beheld it with admiration or with aversion—when

*. See The Chronicle of Morea, cd. by Schmitt, J. (London 1Q04, Methuen), pp. xxxviii-
xlvi.

* In Sicily the local Norman usurpers of the East Roman dominion over the island
had been preceded by Maghrib! Muslims who had brought with them an administrative
technique that had been taken over from the Roman Empire by the Primitive Muslim
Arab conquerors of Syria, Egypt, and North-West Africa.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 95

it was embodied in the person of a Frederick II Hohenstaufen who, be¬
sides being a King of Sicily, was a West Roman Emperor and a man of
genius. Before the close of the thirteenth century a Byzantine autocracy
which the Sicilian Stupor Mundi had failed to acclimatize in the West on
an oecumenical scale was being successfully practised in miniature by
local despots of North and Central Italian city-states; 1 and before the
close of the fifteenth century this balefully efficient exotic institution
was being propagated from Italy into the Transalpine and Transmarine
provinces of Western Christendom, 2 to compete for their allegiance with
an indigenous medieval system of government under which a measure
of political liberty had been secured for at least a privileged minority of
the population through a division of political powers between feudal
monarchies and representative parliaments.

In subsequent chapters of Western history a long-drawn-out struggle
between two opposing political ideals, which appeared, in the eighteenth
century, to be coming to a peaceful end in a rapprochement between an
enlightened form of autocracy and an aristocratic form of parliamentar¬
ism, became acute again in the twentieth century, when a parliamen¬
tarism that had changed its aim to the new objective of becoming a
vehicle for Democracy found itself challenged, in the heart of the
Modern Western World, by an autocracy that had thrown to the winds
both its eighteenth-century watchword of ‘enlightenment’ and its
nineteenth-century watchword of ‘legitimacy’ in order to catch a semi-
educated public in the snare of an unscrupulous propaganda and to
turn this insidiously bridled and blinkered Leviathan into a pliant in¬
strument for a cold-blooded policy of imperialism through military
aggression. It was no accident that an inter-war Fascist regime in Italy
and National-Socialist regime in Germany should have borrowed their
political technique and organization from a recently established Com¬
munist regime in a Russia where 'the political concepts embodied in
the ancient Muscovite state’ had been ‘of Byzantine provenance’. 3

This surprisingly active and many-sided cultural commerce between
a Medieval Western and a contemporary Eastern Orthodox Christendom
proved impotent, however, in the end to overcome the antipathy between
the rival sister societies; and, when a broken-down Orthodox Christian
Civilization reached a point in its disintegration at which the only free¬
dom of manoeuvre left to its hard-pressed epigoni was a liberty still to
choose between ‘turning Frank’ and ‘turning Turk’, the Orthodox
Christian converts to the Iranic Muslim Civilization of the empire-
building ‘Osmanlis 4 were, as we have already observed, 5 both more

1 The impulse given to the establishment of local despotisms in Northern and Central
Italy by the Emperor Frederick II's prestige has been noticed, in another context, in
VII. vii. 537 - 8 . See further X. ix. 13.

2 See III. Hi. 300-1, 305, and 357-63: IV. iv. 198-200; and p. 363, above.

3 Weidle, W.: La Rustic Abtcntc et Pritcnle (Paris 1949, Gallimard), p. 73, quoted on
p. 677, below.

4 Some two hundred years before the emergence of the Ottoman Turkish polity, the
Snljuq Turkish wav of life had exercised an attraction on some of the Greek Orthodox
Christian victims ot these barbarian invaders of the heartland of the East Roman Empire
in Central Anatolia. The military disaster at Melazkcrd in a.d. 1071 proved irretrievable

[Note continued on next page.

* See pp. xsx—2, above.

396 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

numerous and more effective than the converts to the contemporary
Western way of life—even in its attractively precocious North Italian
version.

The eminent Greek Orthodox Christian renegade to Islam, Khass
Murad Palaioldghos Pasha, son of Vitus, who, as Beglerbey of Rumili,
was killed in the Ottoman Sultan Mehmcd II Fatih’s service in the
decisive battle fought by the 'Osmanlis at Beyburt in a.d. 1473 against
the Aq QSyunlu Turkmens, 1 sacrificed his life to greater purpose than
his elder kinsman the Uniate Constantine Palaiologhos Dhrigasis, who,
as East Roman Emperor, was killed at Constantinople in a.d. 1453 in a
hopeless attempt to save a dispossessed Imperial City from resuming
the role for which Geography had designed her by becoming the capital
of an Ottoman Empire whose broad dominions had encompassed this
anomalously surviving metropolitan enclave of East Roman territory on
every side since a.d. 1360-1. Kose MlkhSl ‘Abdallah, the apostate
ancestor of Khass Murad Palaioldghos Pasha’s superior officer ‘All
Bey Mikhaloghlu, had likewise been wiser in his generation, when he
abandoned Orthodox Christianity for Islam in order to become one of
the hereditary grandees of a rising Ottoman polity, 2 than Khass Murad’s

because the Turks who were overrunning Anatolia found collaborators among the East
Roman provincial population (Michael Attaleiitis: Historia, ed. by Bekker, I. (Bonn
1853, Weber), pp. 306 and 307). In the second generation of the post-Mclazkcrd era,
when the Emperor John Comnenus (imperabat a.d. i 118-43) was reconquering a corri¬
dor of territory in the southern highlands of Anatolia, where the terrain was less ad¬
vantageous to the Saljuq light cavalry than it was on the central plateau, he found that
the Christian islanders in Bey Shchir Lake were on such friendly terms with their Turk¬
ish overlords at Q6niyeh that they resisted by force of arms the Emperor’s summons to
them to evacuate the islands and migrate into Turkish territory. ‘Their intercourse with
the Turks of Qfiniyeh had resulted not only in a firm mutual friendship, but in the adop¬
tion by the Christians of the Turkish way of life in many respects, and they were so
friendly with their Turkish neighbours that they regarded the East Romans as their ene¬
mies. Habit, ingrained by passage of Time, is indeed stronger than race or religion’
(Nikitas Khoniatis: KhronUd Dhilyiiis, ed. by Bekker, I. (Bonn 183c, Weber), p. so; cp.
John Kinnamos: Historiae, ed. by Meineke, A. (Bonn 1836, Weber), p. 22). John’s own
nephew and namesake had deserted on the field of battle to the Danishmcnds and had
subsequently become a convert to Islam and had married the daughter of the Sultan
of Qoniyeh (Nikitas, op. cit., pp. 48-49). Kinnamos (op. cit., p. 56) reports the death in
action, in the reign of the Emperor Manuel ( imperabat a.d. 1x43-80), of a Turkish
commander of East Roman origin named GavrtU.

The Greek-speaking islanders whom the East Roman Emperor John Comnenus
evicted from the islands in Bey Shehir Lake in the twelfth century of the Christian Era
were not the last Chmtian inhabitants of these islands to fraternize with the Turks.
When the writer and his wife visited Bey Shehir on the 15th November, 1948, they were
told that the islands were then inhabited by the descendants of Cossack refugees to whom
the Ottoman Government had given asylum there from the hostility of a Muscovite
Imperial Government. _ « See I. i. 370.

1 Before the organization of the Pidishih’s slave-household in and after the reign of
Sultan Murad I (imperabat a.d. 1360-89), the first two generations of Ottoman empire-
builders had buttressed the rising dynasty's power by the creation of a small number of
hereditary grandees, whose interests they sought to attach to those of the House of
‘Osman by endowing these privileged families with large estates and with important
public offices that were heritable de facto if not de jure. These primitive aristocratic
foundations of a familiar conventional type were quickly overlaid by 'the peculiar
institution’ which was to make the Ottoman Empire s military and political fortunes;
yet, although the arcanum imperii of the classic Ottoman servile state was its implacable
proscription of the aristocratic principle of heredity, we know of five houses of grandees
—representing the House of 'Osman’s first essay in the construction of an Ottoman
TtoXirevna —which were already so strongly entrenched by Sultan Murad I’s day that
they managed to survive the adverse change of political and social climate from an
aristocratic to a servile regime.

These five families were the Mikhaloghlular, whose hereditary estates were scattered

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 97
and ‘All Bey’s contemporary the Greek historian Dhoukas, who had
abandoned Orthodox Christianity for Roman Catholicism in order to
take sen-ice with the Genoese despots of one of the Latin regnaperitura 1
in the Levant—the petty principality, established in Mytilene by the
Gattilusi in a.d. 1355, that was extinguished by the Ottoman Padishah
Mehmed II Fatih in a.d. 1462. 1

through Eastern Thncc and Bulgaria and whose hereditary public office was the com-
mandcrship-in-chicf of the pre-janissary light infantry known as Aqynjys (see Babingcr,
Fr., s.v. ’MikhSl-Oghlu’, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. iii (Leyden 1936, Brill),

® * ■* 93 “$) ; ,hc Evrendsoghlular, who were entrusted with the Ottoman conquest of
astern Thrace and Macedonia, remained prominent in Ottoman public life down to
A.D. 1488, and retained_their hereditary estates round Ycnije Vardar down to the nine-

Ett-
aliat

Maiqojogniuiar (see Babinger, loc. cit., p. 494; Mordtmann, loc. cit., p. 34); the
TurakhSnoghlular. who were entrusted with the Ottoman conquest of the Frankish
principalities in Continental European Greece and whose hereditary estates lay round
Yenishchr (LSrissa), the capital of Great Vlakhfa (see Babinger, Fr., s.v. ‘Turnkhan
Beg', in the Encyclopardia of Islam, vol. iv (Leyden 1934, Brill), pp. 876-8); and the
Chenderililer, who held the key office of Grand Vizier for four successive generations
between a.d. 1386 and a.d. 1499—notwithstanding the deadly offence given to Sultan
Mehmed II Fatih which proved fatal to the third Chcnderili Grand Vizier, Khalil (see
Giese, F., s.v. 'Ccndcrili’, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. i (Leyden 1913, Brill), pp.

833-4)-

Of these five privileged houses of hereditary’ Ottoman grandees, no less than three
appear to have been of Orthodox Christian origin. K6se Mikhal 'Abdallah, the founder
and eponym of the Mikhaloghlular, was said to have been the renegade local Greek
Orthodox Christian lord of Chirmcnkia (Turcici Khirmenjik) at the southern foot of the
Mysian Olympus, near Edrenos (Babinger, loc. cit., p. 403). The town of Mikhfilyj,
situated at a strategic point between Brusa and the Dardanelles, perhaps derives its
name from this family (Babinger, loc. cit., p. 495 )- GhSzi Evrcnds Bey, the founder and
eponym of the Evrcndsoghlular, was said to have been a ci-devant Orthodox Christian
retainer of the Turkish Muslim Emir of Qarasy, who entered the service of the Ottoman
Emir Orkhun’s son Suleyman after OrkhSn's conquest of Qarasy in a.d. 1336. As for
the Malqochoghlular, they would appear to have been renegade Serb Orthodox Christ¬
ians if 'Malqoch' is really a Turkish travesty of ‘MarkoviC.

1 Virgil: Georgies, Book II, I. 498.

* Greek Orthodox Christians who opted in the fourteenth or fifteenth century of the
Christian Era for embracing Islam in preference to accepting union with the Western
Christian Church on Western terms could justify their choice by pointing to their own
and their ancestors’ experience of the comparative humanity of the Muslims by com-

S riaon with the Franks. In the East Roman historian Nikitas Khoniltis' Khronikl
dtyisis the appalling accounts of the sack of Salonica by the Sicilian Normans in
a.d. 1:85 (pp. 385-980! the edition published at Bonn in 1835 by Weber) and of the
sack of Constantinople by the so-called 'Crusaders’ in a.d. 1203-4 (ibid., pp. 710-70)
stand out in glaring contrast to the description (ibid., pp. 653-7) of the Saljflq prince
Kay Khusru's chivalrous treatment of the East Roman civilians whom he carried away
captive in a raid on the West Anatolian dominions of the East Roman Empire during the
reign of the Emperor Alexius III Angclus {itnperabat a.d. 1195-1203). Kay Khusru’s
kindness to his prisoners during the campaign, and the favourableness of the conditions
on which he subsequently settled them in his own dominions in the neighbourhood of
Aq Shehir (the ci-des:ant Philomelium), ‘not only prevented the prisoners themselves
from feeling any nostalgia for their native land but also attracted to Philomelium many
East Roman settlers who hsd not been carried away captive by the Turks, on the strength
of reports of the good treatment that their kinsmen and fellow countrymen had received
at the Turks’ hands. The truth was that in the [East] Roman World, by our day, the
springs of Christian virtue had dried up, the truths [of Religion] had ceased to be taken
seriously, and arbitrary injustice had run riot until the natural affections of the majority
of the population had been chilled to a degree at which entire Hellenic [i.c. ’Greek’, not
‘pagan’] communities voluntarily opted for finding new homes among the barbarians
and rejoiced to get away from their native land’ (ibid., p. 657). In another passage (ibid.,
pp. 762-3) the same East Roman observer expressly draws the contrast between the
conduct of the Western Crusaders when they captured Constantinople in a.d. 1203-4
and that of the Muslims when they had recaptured Jerusalem in a.d. 1187 from its
Western Christian conquerors. The Children of Ishmael did not behave like that;
indeed, far from it, they showed the most exemplary humanity and clemency to the

398 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

4. The Medieval West and Kievan Russia 1

The animosity against Western Christendom, which moved Greek
Orthodox Christians in the fifteenth century to opt for falling under an
Ottoman in preference to a Frankish domination, was common to these
fifteenth-century Greeks and their Russian contemporaries; and indeed,
before the century was over, the Muscovites had become the protagonists
in Eastern Orthodox Christendom’s struggle to preserve its ecclesiastical
independence against Western encroachments. One of the signatories,
on the Orthodox side, of the Act of Union concluded at Florence in
a.d. 1439 had been Isidore, the Greek Metropolitan of Moscow; but,
in a.d. 1441, when, after his return to Moscow, Isidore attempted to
honour his signature within his diocese, the Grand Duke Basil II
expelled this Greek betrayer of Orthodoxy, as Isidore appeared to be in
Muscovite eyes, 2 and seized the opportunity to secure in a.d. 1448 3 the
election, by the Muscovite hierarchy, of an anti-unionist metropolitan
of Russian nationality in Isidore’s place. At the same time the Muscovite
metropolitan see repudiated its allegiance to the Oecumenical Patriarch¬
ate; 4 and, when in AJ). 1453 Constantinople had been duly requited for
her apostasy in a.d. 1439 by succumbing to the ‘Osmanlis, Moscow 'the
Third Rome’ remained, as we have seen, 5 in Muscovite estimation, the
sole surviving citadel of Orthodoxy that was both impeccable and
independent.

Thus, within five hundred years of Russia’s conversion, the Russian
branch of Orthodox Christendom had come to be at least as zealous as
the main body was by this date in its resistance to Western ecclesiastical
aggression. But this identical position in which the Russians and the
Greeks were both entrenched in the fifteenth century had been reached
by them along separate roads at different dates. In the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, when Gracco-Frankish relations were already be¬
coming strained in spite of statesmanlike efforts on both sides to keep
the peace, 6 Russo-Frankish relations were becoming closer and more
friendly. The estrangement of the Russians from the West, which had
gone to more than Greek lengths before the end of the fifteenth century,
dated no farther back than the thirteenth century; and the reason why
the break between Russia and the West was thus delayed is evident. In
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when White Russia and the

[Western] kinsmen [of the sackers of Constantinople] after they [i.e. the Muslims] had
taken Jerusalem by force of arms. They did not violate the Latins' womenfolk, they
did not choke the Holy Sepulchre with corpses. ... All that they did [to the Latins of
Jerusalem) was to allow them to go their way in peace on payment of ransoms which they
assessed at a few gold pieces per head—leaving all the rest of the Latins' property to its
owners, even in cases where their wealth was as abundant as the sands ol the sea. This
was how the adversaries of Christ treated Latins who from their standpoint were infidels.
They chivalrously forbore to put them to the sword or subject them to the divers tor¬
ments of fire, famine, persecution, denudation, tribulation, oppression—or any of the
other atrocities which those professedly Christian co-religionists of ours committed
against us, as we have recorded in outline, without their having any provocation on our
part to bring up against us.’_ « See xi, maps 41, 42, and 43.

1 See Platonov, S.: Hisloire de la Russie (Paris 1929, Payot), pp. 166-7.

3 See Halecki, O.: ‘Lcs Trois Romes’, in Le Flambeau, 31® annde, No. 3 (Brussels
1948). p. 281.' * See Platonov, op. cit., loc. cit.

* In VI. vu. 31-40. 6 See pp. 376-80, above.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 399
Ukraine were being progressively subjugated by the Lithuanians and
the Poles, Russian Orthodox Christendom was being hit, for the first
time, by a wave of Western aggression 1 which had struck the main body
of Orthodox Christendom some two or three hundred years earlier,
when the Normans had invaded the East Roman Empire’s dominions in
Southern Italy. In the Russian case, as in the Greek, the estrangement
from the West was the consequence of an unhappy first-hand experience
of unpleasant Western behaviour.

Russia’s earliest relations with Western Christendom had been, like
Bulgaria’s, a consequence of her reception of Christianity at the hands of
the Oecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople; for, though, as we have
seen, 2 Russia—insulated, as she was, from the East Roman Empire by
the two-fold barrier of the Black Sea and the Steppe—could afford to
take less seriously the political subordination to the East Roman
Empire’s sovereignty which was the juridical consequence of becoming
an ecclesiastical subject of the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate, this
political corollary of adhesion to the Constantinopolitan Church was
sufficiently awkward, even for the comparatively distant Russians, to
make them, too, like the Bulgarians, explore the alternative possibility of
entering the fold of Western Christendom. Olga, the first Russian royal
proselyte, sent a mission in a.d. 959 to Otto I to ask him for a bishop 3 after
she had received baptism at Greek hands; and, though Otto’s candidate
Adalbert did not reach Kiev before Olga’s deposition by her pagan son
Svyatoslav, 4 her grandson Vladimir, when, at Kherson in a.d. 989, he
was bringing Russia once for all into the Eastern Orthodox Christian
communion, sought to reinsure himself by receiving a visit from a papal
envoy. 5 Vladimir afterwards gave facilities to St. Bruno for a mission
to the Pechcncgs on the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe; 6
and five embassies from Rome to Russia, and two embassies to Rome
from Kiev, in Vladimir’s reign alone, are mentioned in the Russian
chronicles. 7

In the event, Russia not only adhered, as Bulgaria had finally adhered,
to Eastern Orthodox Christendom; she also voluntarily accepted the
ecclesiastical supremacy of the Oecumenical Patriarchate, to which
Bulgaria submitted only under force majeure. The first Greek metro¬
politan of Kiev, Thcdpemptos, ascended his throne in a.d. 1039 as the
Oecumenical Patriarch’s subordinate, 8 and thereafter, till the Kievan
period of Russian history was brought to an end, mid-way through the
thirteenth century, by the Mongol conquest, all but two of the metro¬
politans of Kiev, and about half the bishops of the Russian dioceses,
were of Greek nationality. 9 There were, it is true, some symptoms of
Russian rcstiveness under this Greek ascendancy. Whatever may be the
significance of the fifty years’ interval between the conversion of Vladimir

1 See II. ii. 172-3, and p. 357, above.

1 On p. 152, n. 6, above. Sec, further, pp. 676—7, below.

J Sec Vernadsky, G.: Kievan Russia (New Haven 1948, Yale University Press), p.
4i, and Dvomik. F.: The Making 0/ Central and Eastern Europe (London 1940, Polish
Research Centre), p. 68. * See Dvomik, op. cit., pp. 69-70.

s See Vernadsky, op. at, p. 65. . 6 See Dvormk, op. at., pp. 201-2.

7 Prince D. Obolensky, in a note to the writer.

8 See Vernadsky, op. cit., p. 79. 9 See ibid., pp. 152 and 350.

400 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
at Kherson in a.d. 989 and the arrival at Kiev of the first Greek metro-

E olitan as a representative of the Oecumenical Patriarch, 1 the Romano-
ussian war of a.d. 1043-6 is described by the Byzantine historian
Psellus 2 as 4 a revolt of the Russians’ that was provoked by their ‘hatred
of the hegemony of the Romans’. 3 In a.d. 1051 and again in a.d. i 145-7
unsuccessful attempts were made in Russia to throw off the Constantino-
politan Patriarchate’s ecclesiastical control. 4 Yet, though in the Kievan
period Russia already ‘formed a distinct socio-political body of her
own’, 5 it is nevertheless true that, ‘culturally, Russia may be thought of
in this period as the northern frontier of Byzantium’. 6 The conversion
of Russia to the Byzantine culture is exemplified in her reception of
East Roman law 7 and of Byzantine literature, 8 and its fruits arc apparent
in her precocity. 9 Like the contemporary Greek World, and unlike the
contemporary Frankish World, Kievan Russia was an urban society
with a money economy and with a lay, as well as a clerical, educated
class. 10

'There is a noticeably greater similarity between Kievan Russia and
Byzantine and Classical Antiquity than between Russia and Feudal
Europe. Only, in this connexion, one would think—in addition to the
Byzantine Empire—not of the Roman Empire but of Republican Rome
and the Greek democracies.... In this period there was a basic difference
in economic and political development between Russia and [Western]
Europe.’"

This difference, however, did not prevent a Byzantine Kievan Russia
and an Early Medieval Western Christendom from entering into econo¬
mic, political, and cultural relations with one another. The contem¬
poraneous conversion of Russia to Orthodox Christianity and of
Hungary, Poland, and the Scandinavian countries to Western Christianity
at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries not only made the old
waterway between the Russian and Swedish provinces of a former pagan
Scandinavian World into a channel of communication between the two
Christendoms; it also established a long land-frontier between them
running from the northern slopes of the Carpathians to the southern
edge of a persisting pocket of paganism in the hinterland of the south-

‘ Pdnce Obolensky notes: ‘The Byzantine and the Russian sources are curiously
silent on the status and organization of the Russian Church during the fifty years that
foUowed Vladimir's conversion. This has led a number of historians to conclude that
the Russian Church was not directly subordinated to the Patriarchate of Constantinople
until a.d. 1037-9, and to suppose that, before that date, it was either subject to Ochrida
or to Rome, or was autocephalous. My own view is that these different theories are not
convincing, and that circumstantial evidence and the testimony of later sources strongly
suggest that V ladlmir’s Church was from the beginning subject to the authority of
Constantinople. But it seems quite probable that Vladimir used his considerable mili¬
tary resources and political powxr as bargaining counters in his unsuccessful attempt to
manage his own ecclesiastical affairs.

* S « e Pwlhis. Michael: Chronograph™, chap. 91 (p. 129 in C. Snthas' edition
(London 1809, Methuen)).

> To Bdppapov . . . roCro 4 >v\ov ini r^v 'Po>pa io*v ijye/ionav rov vdura vpoi-ov XimS

1 Vernadsky, op. cit., pp. 82 and 218-19.

s Ibid., p. i2. 6 Ibid., p. 12.

7 5 ®* Vernadsky, op. cit., pp. 168, 171, and 292-4.

* Sce ibid., pn. 80 and 271-5, and the present Study, X. ix. 7x5-17.

* , S , CC Dvomik, op. cit.. pp. 236-40. 10 See Vernadsky, op.

11 Vernadsky, op. cit., pp. 212 and 213.

cit., p. 280.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 401
east corner of the Baltic Sea; and the debatable territory between
Russia and Poland round Przemysl and Czervien, which Vladimir had
conquered from the Poles in a.d. 981,' became one of the principal
avenues for a two-way traffic.

On the economic plane a Russian overland trade with Western
Christendom was stimulated by the progressive economic adversity
which overtook the East Roman Empire from a.d. 1071 onwards. In the
days of the Empire’s prosperity the Russians had sent an annual flotilla
to trade with Constantinople as the next best thing to a military conquest
of her that they had failed to achieve; but, when, as a result of the
Saljuq Turkish barbarian invaders’ decisive victory at Melazkerd, the
East Roman Empire lost command of the food-producing areas in
the interior of Anatolia, and, when, as a result of the Romano-Venetian
commercial treaty of a.d. 1082, the Venetians, emulated by their Italian
competitors, wrested the maritime trade of the Levant out of Greek
hands and diverted it to Western ports, the Russians found it more
profitable to divert their own trading activities from an impoverished
Constantinople to a prospering West. 1 2 A German record of customs
receipts testifies that Russian traders were entering East Francia over¬
land from the cast as early as a.d. 903-6. 3 4 * 6 From the eleventh century to
the thirteenth—when the overland trade route between the West and
Russia was superseded by a water route via the Baltic, Riga, and
Novgorod—Regensburg was the main Western terminal of a traffic
whose main Russian terminal was Kiev via Smolensk (which, in this

age, had a greater volume of trade with Germany than either Novgorod
or Pskov)/ The transfer of Russian trade from the East Roman Empire
to Germany was still further stimulated by the disaster that overtook
Constantinople in a.d. 1204/

On the political plane the desire of Kievan Russia to entertain rela¬
tions with Western Christendom may be gauged from the number of
royal marriages contracted between members of the House of Rurik
and members of the royal families of Western Christendom. Imperial
marriages with East Roman princesses were, no doubt, more highly
prized/ The Emperor Basil II’s offer of his daughter Anna’s hand in
A.D. 988 was the bait which induced Vladimir I to send military help to
Basil against the rebel Bardas Phokas 7 and then to receive baptism; and
the King Solomon of the Kievan state, Vladimir Monomdkh ( principal-
tumgerebat a.d. 1113-25), derived his surname from his Greek mother,
whose family had been made illustrious by the Emperor Constantine

1 See Dvomik, op. cit., p. 90, and Vernadsky, op. cit., p. 59.

2 See Vernadsky, op. cit., p. 216.

3 Sec Dvornik, F.: ‘The Kiev State and its Relations with Western Europe’, in
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, vol. xxix (London 1947, R. H. S.),

pp. 27-46. The present reference is to p. 42.

4 See ibid., p. 42; cundem, The Making of Central and Eastern Europe, p. 24S; Ver¬

nadsky. op. cit., pp. 338-9. J See Vernadsky, op. cit., p. 6.

6 It is noteworthy that there were no marriages between Kurikids and members of any
Bulgarian imperial family, though, according to Prince D. Obolensky, in a note to the
present writer, the Bulgarian clergy had contributed to the conversion of Russia, and
though, thereafter, Bulgaria played an important part as a cultural intermediary between
Byzantium and Russia (Vernadsky, op. cit., p. 324).

7 See Vernadsky, op. cit., p. 63.

402 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Monomdkhos ( imperabat a.d. 1042-54). Yet, in default of Greek imperial
marriages, Frankish royal marriages were sedulously sought after by
Russian princes. Vladimir I obtained the hands of a Polish and a
Swedish princess for his two sons, and married his three daughters to a
king of Hungary and two kings of Poland. Yaroslav obtained the hands
of a Polish and two German princesses for his sons, and married his
daughters to kings of Norway, France, and Hungary. Vsevolod’s daughter
Eupraxia (Francice Praxedis) married first the Margrave of the East
Frankish Nordmark, Henry of Stade, and then the Holy Roman Emperor
Henry IV (an unhappy marriage, from which she retired to Kiev in a.d.
1095). Vladimir Monomdkh married Gytha, the daughter of King
Harold of England. Vladimir and Isyaslav, the sons of Yaroslav, married
their daughters to kings of Poland and Hungary. Vladimir Monomakh
obtained the hand of a Swedish princess for his son and married his
daughters to a king of Hungary and two kings of Denmark. 1

The footprints of peddlars, brides, and bridegrooms were followed
by pilgrims and monks. In the early twelfth century the shrines of Kiev
were visited by Western pilgrims, and before the close of the century
a church and monastery had been built there by Irish monks from
Regensburg. 2 These religious wayfarers brought with them cults of
saints and translations of books, and, in this cultural commerce between
a Kievan Russia and an Early Medieval Western Christendom, the
principal intermediary was Bohemia, 3 where a Methodian Slavonic tradi¬
tion that had been persecuted by the Franks and betrayed by the Vatican
had managed to survive 4 till the close of the eleventh century. 5 Old
Slavonic translations, made in Bohemia, of Latin lives of the Saints
found their way into Russia along the overland commercial route, and
popularity was achieved in Russia by a late-eleventh-century prayer,
translated into Old Slavonic out of an original Latin text, invoking
Saints Magnus, Cnut, Olaf, Alban, Botolph, Martin, Victor, Linus,
Anacletus, Clement, Leo, Cyril and Methodius, Wenceslas and
Adalbert. 6

'Russia was never more conscious of her common interests with
Western Europe 7 than in the period between the eleventh and thirteenth

' T *?? se marriages between Rurikids and Frankish royalties are noted by Dvornik in
J he Kiev state and its Relations with Western Europe’, d. 41.

2 See Dvomik, ‘The Kiev State’, p. 40.

* See Dvomik, op. cit., p. 39.

4 See ibid., pp. 36-37.

I0 *6 c b “ vomc ' nle monaster y of Sdzava, near Prague, was not suppressed till a.d.

5 See ibid., p. 38.

r* . , . . . -.-- expense—is the institution in Russian

Orthodox Christendom, soon after a.d. 1091 (see Dvornik, ‘The Kiev State', p. 40). of
an annual feast in honour of the translation’ of the relics of St. Nicholas fwhn *v#r\fita1Ur

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 403

centuries.’ 1 It is the more remarkable, and the more tragic, that, between
the thirteenth century and the fifteenth, a Western aggressiveness that
had already alienated the main body of Orthodox Christendom should
have contrived also to dissipate this accumulated fund of Russian good¬
will.

i. Encounters with the Post-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization 2

Likenesses and Differences between the Post-Alexandrine Hellenic and the
Modern Western Eruption

In a post-Alexandrine Hellenic view of Hellenic history the generation
of Alexander the Great marked a break with the past and the beginning
of a new era as sharply as, in a Modern Western view of Western history,
the transition to a ‘modern’ from a ‘medieval’ age was marked by a con¬
juncture of striking new departures on divers planes of activity at the
turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era. 3

In both these new chapters of history the most obvious ground for a
hybristic depreciation of the achievements of the past by comparison
with present experiences and expectations was the consciousness of a
sudden immense increase in power, including both a power over other
human beings, manifested in military conquests, and a power over
Physical Nature, manifested in geographical explorations and scientific
discoveries. The Macedonian conquistadores' feat of overthrowing the
Achaemenidae was as exhilarating as the Spanish conquistadores' feat of
overthrowing the Incas. If a handful of military adventurers could
thus shatter, at one blow, a universal state that had come to seem part of
the permanent order of Nature, the society out of whose bosom these
adventurers had issued forth might account herself, in virtue of their
demonstration of her prowess, to be the potential mistress of all the rest
of Mankind. But this enhanced sense of military and political power was
not the whole, and indeed not the essence, of a new experience which
expressed itself in the feeling that a new era had begun. If either a Hel¬
lene of the third century B.c. or a Westerner of the sixteenth century of
the Christian Era had been asked to describe the sensations by which

1087 had ‘succeeded in carrying them off by a mixture of cunning and violence’ (Obo¬
lensky, loc. cit.).

The Russian liturgical office composed for the celebration of the new festival certainly
takes the Western side, to judge bv the following passages: 'The city of Bari rejoices,
and with it the whole Universe exults.... Like a star thy relics have gone from the East
to the West . . . and the city of Bari has received divine grace by thy presence .... If
now the country of Myra is silent, the whole World, enlightened by the holy worker
of miracles, invokes him with songs of praise.'

One explanation of this unequivocally pro-Bariot Russian line in a dispute in which the
Bariots were flagrantly in the wrong is perhaps to be found in the fact that Bari was a
familiar, and Myra an unfamiliar, place to Russians of that generation. Till the Norman
conquest in a.d. xo“j Bari, as well as Myra, had been a city of the East Roman Empire,
and a garrison of Russian troops had been posted at Bari in a.d. 1066 (see Dvomik,
ibid.).

' Dvomik, ‘The Kiev State’, p. 45. * See xi, maps 24, 27, 28, 20, 31, 32.

3 These two unofficial new eras have been noticed in V. vi. 340-2 and VI. vii. 300.

4o 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
his consciousness of a new era was sustained, he would probably have
given less weight to his sense of an enhancement of his society’s material
power than to his sense of an expansion of its mental horizon. In the
sensation produced by the discovery ‘in real life’ of a hitherto fabulous
India to which the Macedonians made their way by opening up a conti¬
nent, and the Portuguese by mastering the Ocean, the sense of power
arising from the successful performance of a mighty feat of exploration
was accompanied and qualified, on both occasions, by a sense of wonder
at the revelation of a marvellous alien world endowed with a myster-
\ously inimitable skill and wisdom. In the sensation produced in the
Hellenic World by the scientific discoveries of an Aristotle or a Theo¬
phrastus, and in the Western World by the ‘renaissance’ of the Hellenic
culture, the sense of power arising from a notable addition to knowledge
and understanding was likewise accompanied and qualified by a sense of
impotence in face of the reminder of Man’s relative ignorance which
every addition to Man’s understanding of the Universe is apt to brine
with it. r b

This comparison of the Hellenic World’s experience in and after the
generation of Alexander the Great with the Western World’s experience
at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian
Era might offend the amour propre of post-Modcrn Western readers
who had not yet emancipated themselves from the Modern Western
World s irrational belief in its own uniqueness. But, before deciding to
dismiss the suggested parallel as an unwarranted impertinence, Western
believers in the incomparability of their own society would be well
advised to put themselves on the alert against the distorting effects of
the egocentric illusion’ on a historian’s perspective, 1 and, in a chastened
frame of mind, to give a dispassionate consideration to the facts.

Even on the crudely simple test of the comparative extent of the areas
over which the Modem Western Civilization and the post-Alexandrine
Hellenic Civilization respectively succeeded in radiating their influence,
it might be observed that Hellenism had anticipated the West in pushing
its waytothe extremities of the Old World-as far as Ceylon and Japan

?K- d ^? ta 'i 1 ~7 and that ’ ,f ‘?| exandcr had lived to be so tormented by his
thirst for finding new worlds to conquer as to have been stimulated’into
forestalling the fifteenth-century Portuguese invention of ocean-going
sailing ships he might have forestalled the Spanish discovery of the
;^™ n y ? find,hal no . civilization had yet emerged there above
the dead level of primitive social life. If future research into the chrono-
logy of the indigenous American civilizations were to confirm the
probability that the genesis of the earliest of them was posterior to Alex¬
ander s day, then the post-Alexandrine Hellenic Society would prove to
have anticipated the Modern Western Society in having achieved the
feat of making an impact on all existing contemporary societies of its
own species; and when we call the roll of these two supremely aggres¬
sive civilizations respective victims, we find that their numbers arc
approximately cqua The post-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization was
encountered by the Syriac, the Hittite, the Egyptiac, the Babvlonic, the

1 See I. i. 157-64.

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 405
Indie, and the Sinic; the Modern Western Civilization by the Orthodox
Christian the Islamic the Hindu, and the Far Eastern. Even if we
multiply the number of the Modern West’s victims by adding the Jews
to the list and by distinguishing an Iranic from an Arabic Muslim
society, and Russian and Japanese branches from the respective main
bodies of the Orthodox Christian and Far Eastern societies, we shall
only have brought the number of the Modern West’s victims up to
eight, as against the six victims of the Modern West’s post-Alcxandrine
Hellenic rival. r

On this showing, we may venture to conclude that our comparison is
a legitimate one, but, in vindicating it, we must also take note of one
important difference. In studying the impact of the Modern West on its
contemporaries’ we have found occasion to distinguish between an
Early Modern Age, in which the West was radiating out its culture in
its full-blooded entirety, including the religious clement that was its
essence, and a Late Modern Age, in which the West was radiating out a
secular extract from its culture, from which the religious element had
been eliminated. 1 There is no corresponding division of chapters in the
post-Alcxandrine history of the radiation of Hellenism; for, by compari-
son with the Western Civilization, Hellenism was precocious. The
Western Civilization did not secularize its Weltanschauung till the close
of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, a thousand years after
its entry on to the stage of History through its emergence from a post-
He erne social interregnum. The corresponding Aufkldrung in the
tieilcmc World took place towards the close of the fifth century b.c., not
more than seven hundred years after a post-Minoan social interregnum
had brought an Hellenic Civilization to birth. Thus, by Alexander’s day,
this Hellenic Aufkldrung was already a hundred years old, and there was
no first chapter of post-Alcxandrine Hellenic history in which Hellenism
was propagated in its original integrity. The Attic drama that was pre¬
sented to Parthians and Spaniards was not the communal religious rite
that was celebrated in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens at annual festi¬
vals that were red-letter days in the local Attic ecclesiastical calendar;
it was a commercial performance staged by a vagrant international
dramatic artists’ guild trading under the name Aioviaov Ttyylrai*

One of the possible reasons for the Hellenic Civilization’s compara¬
tive precocity in bursting out of the intellectual swaddling clothes of
traditional religion is the apparent poverty of the Hellenic Society’s
religious heritage from the antecedent Minoan Society 3 by comparison
with the richness of the Christian heritage bequeathed to* the Western
Society by a Hellenism which had been converted to Christianity on its
death-bed.* In Hellenic history the comparative insignificance of a
religious legacy, which, in Western history, was to act as both a powerful
1 £ cc PR- n8_, 9 and 316-24, above.

* § 5 * ,V - IV : * 43 : V. v. 201. n. 1, and 481; and p. 5x8, below.

1 The question whether Orphism is or is not to be regarded as a legacy to the Hellenic
bociety from the religious experience of a disintegrated Minoan Society has been dis¬
cussed in I. 1. 95-100 and in V. v. 84-7- See further X. ix. 738-40.

« In a previous context (VII. vii. 420-3) we have come to the conclusion that the heri¬
tage of a higher religion isa feature that distinguishes the civilizations of the third genera¬
tion, as a sub-species, from those of the second generation and the first.

406 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
stimulus and a heavy incubus, can be seen to have had a twofold effect.
On the one hand it allowed Rationalism to raise its head more easily, and
therefore more early, than it was to prove possible for Rationalism to
triumph in Western Christendom; but on the other hand an intellec¬
tually enlightened Hellenic World never showed itself so prone as a
secularized Late Modern Western World to intellectual hybris.

The Western pioneer rationalists’ successive experiences of being first
embittered by the length and arduousness of their struggle with a formid¬
ably entrenched Western Christian Church, and then intoxicated by the
apparent completeness of their eventual victory, bred in them a temper
expressed in the Voltairian war-cry ‘ficrascz l'lnfimc’; and this un¬
enlightened spirit of intolerance, which a Modern Western Enlighten¬
ment had caught from the Judaic religion against whose dominion it had
revolted, made a self-emancipated West equally unwilling to give
credence, credit, or quarter to ‘the imposture’ of Muhammad or to any
other of the living higher religions with which it was being brought into
contact by the world-wide activities of its mariners, traders, and empire-
builders. In this temper the Late Modern Western rationalist intellect
did not hesitate to banish Religion itself from its mental kingdom of
spiritual forces and values as a superfluous, illusory, and morbid excres¬
cence on the healthy tissue of the rational human animal’s social and
cultural life; but the earlier victory of the Hellenic Enlightenment over
a less tenacious religious conservatism had a different sequel.

In this Hellenic spiritual passage of arms a disgust at the light¬
hearted immorality of the shameless barbarian pantheon of Olympus,
and a revulsion from the spiritually deeper, but also darker, stratum of
Hellenic religious life that was tapped by the ‘chthonic’ cults of blood
and soil, were quickly overborne by an unsatisfied hunger for spiritual
bread which had already begun to torment Hellenic souls before the
fifth-century Aufklarung had deprived them of even the stony substitute
which was all that had been doled out to them by the parsimony of
History. When the triumphal progress of their military and intellectual
conquests brought the post-Alexandrine Hellenes into contact with
full-blooded non-Hellenic religions whose spiritual value and efficacy
seemed to be guaranteed by their manifestly assured command of their
votaries’ voluntary allegiance, the emotion that this spectacle evoked in
Hellenic hearts had more in it of a wistful envy for the privileged pos¬
sessors of a spiritual pearl of great price 1 than of a contemptuous pity for
the dupes of an unscrupulously fraudulent priestcraft. Even the syncre-
tistic religious cults devised by coldly calculating post-Alexandrine
Hellenic statesmen—such as Ptolemy Sbter’s attempt to bring his
Egyptiac and Hellenic subjects together on common religious ground
through his manufacture of the hybrid divinity Sarapis, 2 or Augustus’s
institution of Cacsar-worship to serve as the religious cement for a
Roman-built Hellenic universal state 3 —were tributes to their Hellenic
subjects’ horror of a religious vacuum, besides being designs for taking
advantage of their non-Hellenic subjects’ religiosity.

This receptive attitude of the post-Alexandrine Hellenic conquerors

• Sec V. v. 545-9. * See V. v. 689-91. J See V. v. 648-50.

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 407
towards the religions of societies which Hellenism had taken captive on
the intellectual as well as on the military plane was one cause of the
momentous religious consequences of an aggressive Hellenic Civiliza¬
tion’s impact on six societies of the same species. We must take the
measure of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism’s flow and ebb if we are to
see its religious consequences in their historical setting.

The Flow and Ebb of Post-Alexandrine Hellenism

In a process of penetration that resulted in a temporary Hellenization
of the World, the entering wedge thrust in by Alexander the Great and
his Macedonian and Roman successors was the death-dealing point of
the sarissa and the pilum, and the first objective of these Hellenic military
aggressors was the economic exploitation of their victims. Yet their
profession of the nobler aim of propagating the achievements and ideals
of the Hellenic culture was something more than a specious camouflage
for the pursuit of a sordid self-interest by methods of barbarism. This
profession was also partially sincere, and the warrant of its sincerity was
the extent of its translation from words into facts.

The Hellenic conquerors’ master-instrument for the fulfilment of
their promise to impart the spiritual wealth of the Hellenic culture in ex¬
change for appropriating a share of the material wealth of the populations
whom they had conquered was the institution, in partibus Orientalium
et Barbarorum , of Hellenic city-states, created ex nihilo by a politic¬
ally omnipotent Hellenic war-lord’s fiat, out of which a nucleus of
privileged Hellenic citizen-colonists was to radiate the light of Hellenism
among the subject native peasantry of the surrounding country-side
from whom the intrusive landlord-missionaries drew their rents. A
policy that had been inaugurated on the grand scale by Alexander the
Great himself was pursued thereafter, for some four and a half centuries,
by Alexander’s Macedonian and Roman successors down to the Emperor
Hadrian. 1

Even in Egypt, where the economic exploitation of the indigenous
population was more efficient and more overt than in any other land on
which Hellenism had imposed itself by conquest, 2 and where ‘the
natives’, on their side, had been wont, since the Hyksos’ conquest of
Egypt not much less than fourteen hundred years before Alexander’s
day, to reject the culture of successive alien conquerors with a demonic
animosity, 3 at least a veneer of the Hellenic city-state dispensation was
laid over the granite rock-bottom of a petrified Egyptiac body social
before the end of the story of the encounter between these two dramatic¬
ally diverse civilizations. In their anxiety not to diminish the Egyptian
milch-cow’s scientifically managed yield, Alexander’s narrow-hearted
Ptolemaic successors deliberately forbore, in Egypt, from further
foundations of Hellenic city-states after they had added Ptolemais to
Alexandria and to a pre-AIcxandrine Naucratis; and the unimaginative
Roman successors of the Ptolemies had no other aim in Egypt than to
maintain the yield which the Ptolemies had taught them to extract; yet,
in the third century of the Christian Era, in an age in which the spread
• See VI. vii. hi and 132-5. * See pp. 696-8, below. J Sec VI. vii. 49-50.

4 o8 encounters between contemporaries

of the Hellenic city-state dispensation was coming to a halt in other
provinces of an Hellenic universal state, the immemorially ancient
cantons (‘nomes’) of Egypt were being superficially converted into the
simulacra of self-governing municipalities equipped with the amenities
of Hellenic urban life. 1 Outside Egypt, in their Asiatic possessions, even
the Ptolemies had vied with their Selcucid neighbours and rivals in
showing themselves worthy heirs of their common master Alexander—
as was witnessed by a chain of Hellenic city-states, strung along the
Transjordanian stretch of ‘the King’s Highway’ 2 from Gadara to a
Rabbath Ammon masquerading as Philadelphia, 3 which were eventually
taken over by the Seleucidae from their Ptolemaic founders, and by the
Romans from the Seleucidae.

This more or less benevolently despotic propagation of the Hellenic
culture by Hellenic conquerors is not, however, so remarkable as its
spontaneous adoption by non-Hellenes who were under no external
compulsion to open their hearts and minds to it. A Philadelphia and an
Adrianople, whose names commemorate their foundation by some
Macedonian or Roman potentate, arc less eloquent monuments of the
Hellenic culture’s intrinsic attractiveness than a Nicomedia and a Nicaea,
whose names commemorate their foundation by the Philhellene descen¬
dants of a barbarian prince of Bithynia who had thrown off the yoke of
the Achaemenidae, had escaped being conquered by Alexander, and had
successfully resisted the imperialism of the Seleucidae. In the Antonine
Indian Summer of Hellenic history, these post-Alcxandrinc Hellenic
city-states that owed their existence to the unconstrained Philhellenism
of ci-devant barbarians could proudly point to the achievements of an
Arrian of Nicomedia 4 and a Dio of Prusa as evidence that they were
making as great a contribution to Hellenic life and letters in that genera¬
tion as Antioch or Alexandria, not to speak of Chaeronea or Athens.

Thus, in the event, the post-Alexandrine Hellenic culture made
peaceful conquests of ground which had not been won for it by Mace¬
donian or Roman soldiers, while in other regions, over which the tide
of Hellenic military conquest had once flowed victoriously, the ebb of
Hellenism in this repellantly aggressive guise was followed by a politic¬
ally liberated non-Hellenic population’s voluntary reception, on their
own initiative, of an Hellenic culture to whose aesthetic and intellectual
attractions they had remained impervious so long as this alien Weltan¬
schauung had been made odious to them by being associated with their
forcible subjection to a distasteful alien rule. The cultivation of Hellenic
art in the Kushan successor-state of a Bactrian Greek empire astride
the Hindu Kush in the last century B.C. and the first century of the
Christian Era, and the cultivation of Hellenic science and philosophy
in the Sasanian and ‘Abbasid successor-states of a Selcucid Greek
Empire in 'Iraq and Iran, 5 had, like the cereal crops of Egypt, to wait for

* Sec VI. vii. so, and pp. 443-4 and 586, below. * See VI. vii. 100-2.

» After the liquidation of Hellenic rule south of the Taurus by the Primitive Muslim
Arabs, a previously Ammonite 'Philadelphia' reverted to the name 'Amman.

« Sec V. v. 38.

* It is significant that, although the self-Hellcnization of the Syriac World east of
the Euphrates did not reach its zenith until after the beginning of the 'Abbasid Age, and

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 409

its harvest till the subsidence of a fructifying but overwhelming flood
had allowed the fertilized fields to show their faces again to the Sun.

The extent to which the military conquests of Hellenic war-lords,
imposing though these were, were outranged, in the Time-dimension as
well as in the Space-dimension, by the pacific radiation of the Hellenic
culture is revealed by a comparative survey of the expansion of Hellen¬
ism on these two different planes.

Though the energy, man-power, and technique which the Hellenic
Society diverted to the military conquest of its neighbours was a mere
residue left over from the military resources that it was generating and
expending in the chronic pursuit of fratricidal civil wars, 1 the first im-

although the ‘Abbasid Caliphate embraced Syria and Egypt as well as ‘Iriq, Iran, and
the Oxus-Jaxai.es Basin, the sources from which the Syriac-speaking and Arabic-
speaking Hellenists of the 'Abbasid Age drew their draughts of Hellenic culture were
not Alexandria or Antioch or any other focus of Hellenism in Syriac territories west of
the Euphrates which had been under Hellenic rule for nearly a thousand years, but were
Jund-i-ShapOr in Khuzistan, on the south-eastern fringe of the Tigris-Euphrates Basin,
and the oasis of Merv on the south-western fringe of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin (sec
O’Leary, de L.: How Greek Science Parsed to the Arabs (London 1948, Kegan Paul),

C P- 95 . 96 . 117. and 155). A political explanation of this apparent cultural paradox may
: found in the fact that in Margiana and Susiana Hellenic rule had lasted less than two
hundred years, instead of more than nine hundred, and had long since ceased to be re¬
membered, and by the same token ceased to be resented, by the sixth century of the
Christian Era, when Khusru Anuahirwan ( imperabat a.d. 531-79) founded at Jund-i-
ShSpur a school of Hellenic medicine and philosophy on the pattern of the school of
Alexandria.

Jund-i-ShapOr was selected by Anushirwan for this purpose because it had been an
Hellenic city and a home of Aristotelian studies; but its Greek population had been the
monument of an Hellenic military defeat, not of an Hellenic victory. They had been

E risoners-of-war and civilian deportees who had been planted there by the Sasanian
mperor Shfipur I ( imperabat a.d. 241-72) after his capture of the Roman Emperor
Valerian and conquest of the Syrian metropolis Antioch-on-Orontes in a.d. 260—in
contrast to the former Greek population of the by then no doubt already extinct Hellenic
city-state Seleucia-on-Eulacus (sec Tam, W. W.: The Greeks in Bactria and India
(Cambridge 1938, University Press), p. 18), which, like all cities of that name, had been
founded by the Sclcucidac, and whose Greek citizens, in their day, had been, not
'displaced persons’, but an ‘ascendancy’ dominating the native inhabitants of the ci-
devant Achaemenian imperial city of Susa. The deportees who had brought the study
of Aristotle to Jund-i-Shipur from Antioch-on-Orontes in the third century of the
Christian Era had presumably been Greek-speaking, or at any rate bilingual; but,
whatever the original standing of the Greek language at Jund-i-Shipur may have been,
Syriac came to prevail there as the linguistic medium for Science as well as for the affairs
of everyday life (see O’Leary, op. cit.. p. 71).

It is also significant that, in the self-Hellcnization of the Syriac World in the ‘Abbasid
Age, an important part was played by the fossilized remnant of an elsewhere extinct
Babylonic culture that survived at Martin in North-Western Mesopotamia (see Sweet-
man, J. W.: Islam and Christian Theology, Part I, vol. i (London J945, Lutterworth
Press), pp. 84-85; O’Leary, op. cit., pp. 171-5)- One of the most eminent of the ninth-
century translators of Greek works into Arabic was the Harrani Thabit b. Qurri, who
was excommunicated and banished by the pagan high priest of Harrin but nevertheless
remained faithful to his ancestral religion—though his loyalty to it cost him his post of
physician to the Caliph Qihir ( imperabat a.d. 932-4). The Martinis were particularly
well qualified for serving as interpreters of Hellenism to the Syriac World because a very
strong tincture of Hellenism had been infused into their own Babylonic culture (see
Sweetman, op. cit., pp. 84-85; O’Leary, op. cit., p. 172). This syncretism was the fruit
of an attitude of receptivity towards the Hellenic culture; and this receptivity, in
its turn, was the fruit of an entente eordiale between the Babylonic subjects and the
Macedonian destroyers of the Achaemenian Empire. The religious and intellectual
leaders of the Babylonic Society had seen in Alexander the Great a liberator from an
alien yoke which had become an agency for the encroachment of the Syriac language
and culture upon the Babylonic Society’s domain (see V. v. 94 and 123); and, under
a subsequent easy-going Sclcucid regime, the peasantry of Babylonia had not been
alienated by being made the victims of a Ptolemaic exploitation.

1 Sec III. iii. 138-40 and 149-50. »nd p. 437, below.

4io ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

pact of the Alexandrine Hellenic war-machine was shattering, and in
the sequel its final recoil was delayed no less than twice by a fresh career
of conquest which disappointed the hopes of adversaries who had rashly
ventured to try conclusions again with an aggressor whose martial
energy had delusively appeared to be flagging.

The overwhelming psychological effect produced by Alexander’s
astonishing feat of overthrowing the Achaemenian Empire in five years 1
is attested by the passivity of the conquered populations during the
fratricidal wars for the division of the spoils which Alexander’s Mace¬
donian successors continued to wage against one another for forty years
(321-281 b.C.) after Alexander’s death 2 with the same impunity as the
Arab conquerors of the Roman and Sasanian empires a thousand years
later, after the death of the Caliph ‘Uthman, and the Spanish conquerors
of the Andean Empire of the Incas in the sixteenth century of the
Christian Era. 3 This diversion of the conquerors’ efforts to the task of
self-destruction did, indeed, save the independence of the former pro¬
vinces of the Achaemenian Empire, from Bithynia to Azerbaijan inclu¬
sive, which had happened to lie beyond striking distance of Alexander’s
left wing on his march from the Hellespont to the Caspian Gates; but, of
all the territories that Alexander had overrun, the Indus Valley alone
escaped from his successors’ grasp; and this was an ex-Achaemenian
territory which had thrown off the Achaemenian yoke long before
Alexander’s advent. No appreciable portion of Alexander’s conquests
that had been acquired by him direct from the Achaemenian Empire
was lost by his successors till the Parnian Nomads from Transcaspia
took possession of the Seleucids’ province Parthia about half way
through the third centuiy B.C.; 4 and, after that, circa 183 B.C., the ruler
of a Greek principality in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, whose communica¬
tions with the heart of the Hellenic World had been cut by the Parnians’
intrusion, was nevertheless able to muster the military strength to cross
the Hindu Kush and overrun the vast domain of a broken-down
Mauryan Empire, from the Panjab to Sind and Bengal.

This stroke might have added the whole of India to the territories
under Hellenic rule, if the new prize had not evoked a new round of
fratricidal wars for the division of the spoils between Greek and Greek.
Yet neither the conquest of the Bactrian Greek conqueror of India’s
base of operations north-west of the Hindu Kush in 168-7 B.C. by
a rival Greek war-lord who was perhaps the leader of a Seleucid expedi¬
tionary force 5 nor the subsequent conquest of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin

* See II. ii. 139.

* See XI. i*. 260-7:.

J The proneness of *lien conquerors of universal states to turn their arms against
one another has been noticed in IV. iv. 4S4-6.

* Perhaps the only exception was the fringe of cx-Achaemenian territory along the
eastern edge of the Iranian Plateau which Seleucus I Nicator ceded, circa 303 B.C.,
together with his claims to the already lost Indus Basin, to the founder of the Mauryan
Empire, Chandragupta, in exchange for five hundred war-elephants for use in Seleucus's
wars against his Macedonian rivals (sec Smith, V. A.: The Early History 0/ India, 3rd
ed. (Oxford 1014, Clarendon Press), p. 119; Tam, W. W.: The Greeks in Bactria and
India (Cambridge J938, University Press), p. :oo).

s For this account of Eucratidas. sec Tarn, W. W.: The Greeks in Bactria and India
(Cambridge 1938, University Press), pp. 186-2:6.

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 411

by the Yuechi Nomads between 141 and 128 B.c. 1 prevented the Greeks
from clinging to part of Demetrius’s Indian conquests. Greek rule
lingered on south-east of the Hindu Kush till after 32 b.c. 2 and thus
perhaps just overlapped in time with the establishment of an Hellenic
universal state round the coasts of the Mediterranean in the shape of the
Roman Empire. In conquering a Carthaginian Empire which had
successfully foiled the efforts of all previous Hellenic aggressors to break
into the Syriac Society’s colonial domain in the western basin of the
Mediterranean, the Romans had emulated in the west the eastward
conquests of Alexander the Great and Demetrius; and, when the Romans
subsequently marched eastward in turn in Alexander’s footsteps, they
brought the Orientals’ first military counter-offensive to a halt in the
last century b.c. and postponed the final liquidation of Hellenic rule
south-east of Taurus for another seven hundred years.

Before the tide of war was thus turned again in the Hellenic Society’s
favour by Roman force of arms, the Oriental counter-offensive had
gone far. A westward expansion of the Parthian Power from the Caspian
Gates to the east bank of the Middle Euphrates, which was maintained
against successive Selcucid attempts to push the Parthians back between
140 and 129 B.C., had ham-strung the Seleucid Power by depriving it
of its granary in Babylonia. The surviving remnant of a Macedonian
successor-state of the Achaemenian Empire whose rule had once ex¬
tended from the Aegean to the Pamirs was snuffed out when the Seleucid
capital, Antioch-on-Orontes, was occupied in 83 B.c. by Tigranes, the
king of the Seleucid Power’s parvenu Armenian successor-state. In
87-86 B.c. the soldiers of Mithradates Eupator, the king of the Achae¬
menian Empire’s never conquered Pontic Cappadocian successor-state,
had carried Oriental arms as far into Continental European Greece as
the Achaemenid Emperor Xerxes had penetrated in 480-479 B.c. 3 And
these territorial gains by independent Oriental Powers at the Hellenic
Powers’ expense, extensive though they had been, had not been so
ominous as the internal revolts of previously passive subject Oriental
populations. As early as the turn of the third and second centuries B.c.
the Ptolemaic Power had been shaken in its Egyptian citadel by the
mutinousness of Egyptian fallahtn whom the Ptolemaic Government
had rashly converted from peasants into soldiers at a crisis in one of the
fratricidal wars between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Greek empires;
and thereafter, in 166 b.c., the hillmen of Judaea had successfully
revolted against a Seleucid regime which had annexed the Ptolemies’
Syrian possessions at the opening of the century’ without taking over the
Ptolemies’ prudent policy of cultural laisser-faire . 4

This wave of Oriental militancy was broken by a counter-wave of
Roman conquest and empire-building in the East. Between 74 and 62
b.c. successive Roman expeditionary forces led by Lucullus and Pompcy
subjugated successor-states of the Achaemenian Empire in Northern
and North-Eastern Anatolia, from Bithynia to Pontus inclusive, which

1 See Tam, op. cit, p. 277.

* See ibid., p. 343. 3 Sec I. i. 76, n. 1.

* This native insurrection against Ptolemaic and Seleucid rule in Egypt and Judaea
in the second century b.c. hss been noticed in V. v. 68.

4X2 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
had never been conquered by Alexander or by any of his Macedonian
successors; Antioch-on-Orontes, with the rest of the former metropolitan
territory of the Seleucid Monarchy in Northern Syria, was wrested out
of Tigranes’ hands; and the line of the Middle Euphrates' was selected
by Pompey to serve as the eastern military and political frontier of an
Hellenic World which had now been taken under Rome’s aegis. When
the chill shadow of Roman military power thus descended on the cx-
Achaemenian territories west of Euphrates, an Egyptian peasantry who
had been taking advantage of the relaxation of the Ptolemies’ grip were
sufficiently sensitive to this fresh change in the local political climate to
relapse into their customary sullen submissiveness for the next five
centuries, till the Monophysitc Movement gave them their opportunity,
in the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian Era, to resume their
revolt against Hellenism by defying a Roman regime which was then at
last beginning to go the way of its Ptolemaic predecessor. The Jews, who
were perhaps more passionate, though not more fanatical or more
stubborn, than their Egyptian fellow victims, wilfully blinded them¬
selves to the signs of the times 2 and brought destruction upon their
metropolitan community in Judaea by three times challenging the
Romans to ordeal by battle between a.d. 66 and a.d. 135. 3

Nor did the Roman counter-offensive against the independent
Oriental Powers come to a permanent standstill at the Pompeian line
along the Middle Euphrates, notwithstanding Crassus’s disastrous failure
in 53 B.c. to conquer the Parthian Empire of the Arsacidac, and
Trajan’s all but disastrous repetition of Crassus’s ambitious enterprise
in a.d. 114-17. Augustus’s more modest forward move of asserting
Rome’s suzerainty over Armenia in 20 b.c. had more lasting effects, and
the obstinate unwillingness of the Arsacidae and their Sasanid successors
to reconcile themselves to this unpalatable fait accompli beyond their
northern borders eventually provoked successive eastward advances of a
Roman frontier which Trajan’s successor Hadrian had withdrawn again
to Pompcy’s Euphratean line from Trajan’s outposts at the foot of the
Zagros and the head of the Persian Gulf. The southern frontier of
Rome’s Armenian protectorate was progressively screened against
attack or infiltration from a base of hostile operations in Babylonia by
Marcus Aurelius’s annexation of Osrhocnc in a.d. 166 and Septimius
Scverus’s annexation of the rest of Northern Mesopotamia, up to the
line of the River Khabur, in a.d. 194-9. Even after these cumulative
failures to stand up to Rome had cost the Arsacids their throne in a.d.
224, and after the ensuing bout of anarchy by which the Roman Empire
was convulsed between a.d. 235 and a.d. 284 had given the Arsacids’
militant Sasanid successors a unique opportunity to show their mettle,
the first trial of strength between an old Roman and a new Sasanian
Power ended humiliatingly for the Sasanidae in a further eastward
extension of the cordon of Roman territory along the southern frontier
of Armenia through the annexation to the Roman Empire of five districts
cast of the Tigris in a.d. 296.

Indeed, during the four centuries of its existence, the Sasanian Power

« See p. 358, n. 2, above. 2 Sec V. v. 390, n. 3. J See V. v. 68.

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 413
showed itself impotent to fulfil its raison d'etre by completing a liquida¬
tion of Hellenic rule in the former domain of the Achacmenian Empire
which the Sasanids’ Arsacid predecessors had so nearly accomplished in
the second century b.c. The Sasanids’ permanent achievements went no
farther than the recovery of the five districts east of Tigris and the
Mesopotamian frontier fortress of Nisibis in a . d . 363 and the acquisi¬
tion of the lion’s share of Armenia when, circa a . d . 387 - 90 ,' the Roman
Imperial Government freed its hands for grappling with a threat to its
existence on the Danube by consenting to the partition of this long-
disputed buffer-state beyond the Euphrates. Even the last and most
devastating of the Romano-Persian wars ( gerebatur a . d . 603 - 28 ) ended
in a peace of exhaustion on the basis of the status quo ante bellum ; and, in
bleeding his empire white for the sake of seeing his outposts temporarily
occupy Calchcdon and Tripolitania, Khusru II Parwlz was merely open¬
ing the door and showing the way to Arab tertii gatidentes.

These Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors performed the last act in
the drama of the Syriac World’s encounter with Hellenism on the
military and political plane by finally liquidating Roman rule in Syria
and Egypt and reconstituting in twelve campaigns ( gerebantur a . d . 632 -
43 ) the Syriac universal state which it had taken Alexander five cam¬
paigns (gerebantur 334-330 b . c .) to destroy. 2 Thus the end of an Hellenic
military ascendancy which had endured for 973 years in the ex-
Achaemenian provinces west of the Euphrates was as swift and conclu¬
sive as its original imposition had been. But the spectacle on this military
plane gives only a superficial and misleading impression of the true
course of the encounter; for, as we have already observed, Alexander
and his Macedonian and Roman successors, in compelling their Oriental
victims to submit to the force of Hellenic arms, had provoked them into
steeling their hearts and minds against the reception of the Hellenic cul¬
ture; and, after these Hellenic men of war had done their obstructive
work, an Hippocrates and an Aristotle had still to wait patiently for
centuries on the threshold of a closed academic door which no military
weapon could prise open to give them entry. The Syriac World did not
begin to show a spontaneous interest in Hellenic science and philosophy
till it had begun to shake itself loose from Hellenic domination by provid¬
ing itself with a Christianity of its own in the shape of the Nestorian and
Monophysite heresies and with a literary medium of its own in the shape
of the Syriac language; and the door thus at last set ajar was not opened
w ide till after the Arabs had pushed the Romans back beyond the Taurus
and had brought with them the Arabic language as an alternative medium
to the Syriac. If any credit is to be given to any men-at-arms for the
belated self-Hellenization of Syriac minds, we must conclude that the
military pioneers who cleared the way for these minds’ reception of

! According to Chmtemen, A.: L Iran soui let Satsamdet (Copenhagen 1936, Levin
and Munksgaard), p. 248, the partition was carried out early in the reign of Vahram IV
(regnabat cither a.d. 388-90 or a.d. 386-97). According to J. B. Bury, in his editio minor
of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. iii
(London 1901, Methuen), p. 504, the negotiator of the partition on the Roman side was
Theodosius I {imperabat a.d. 379-93)-

4 X 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the Hellenic culture were not an Alexander or a Pompey but were a
Khalid b. al-Walid and a S'ad b. abl Waqqas.

The success of the Nestorian and Monophysite movements in achiev¬
ing by non-military means, before the advent of the Muslim Arab
warriors, so much more for the liberation of the Syriac World than had
ever been accomplished by the Maccabees or the Sasanidae, is an
exemplification, in the experience of the Hellenic Society’s victims, of a
fundamental law governing the histories of encounters between societies
which has been put in classical form, in terms of Hellenic experience,
in Horace’s celebrated epigram Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et
artes intulit agresti Latio Hellenes and Orientals alike achieved cultural
conquests as a result of having fallen into military and political adversity;
and the Hellcnization of the Latin-speaking barbarians of Central Italy
through the gentle influence of conquered Greek city-states in Campania
and Magna Graecia was not the earliest instance of this phenomenon in
Hellenic history. The Greek-speaking barbarians of Macedonia and
Epirus were being Hellenized in the same age through the forcible in¬
corporation of a Chalcidice and an Ambracia into their Homerically
adolescent bodies politic; 2 and, more than two hundred years earlier
than that, the forcible incorporation of the Greek city-states along the
western seaboard of Anatolia into the barbarian kingdom of Lydia had
made a Philhcllene out of a Croesus who had come to the throne at
Sardis as the leader of an anti-Hellenic party. 1

In the Hellenic Civilization’s encounter with its Syriac sister society
the fitful imposition of Carthaginian rule upon Greek city-states in
Western Sicily over a period of a century and a half, beginning with the
launching of the great Carthaginian offensive in 409 B.c. and ending in
the outbreak of the First Romano-Punic War in 263 b.c., probably did
more to Hellenize the Syriac Society’s colonial domain in the western
basin of the Mediterranean than the subsequent Hellenic conquest and
colonization of the Carthaginian Empire by the Hellenic Civilization’s
Roman converts. In Anatolia in the last century B.c. a Mithradatcs
Eupator, who emulated Xerxes in boasting of a Persian pedigree as well
as in carrying his arms into European Greece, was at the same time
proud to account himself a Philhcllene; and the source of the Hellenism
which had captivated this Oriental war-lord of a Pontic Cappadocia that
had escaped Macedonian conquest was not an imperial Pella or Antioch;
it was a subject Sinope which had been annexed by Eupator’s grand¬
father Pharnaces circa 183 b.c. and had been chosen by Eupator himself
to be the maritime Greek capital of his motley dominions 4 in place of a

« Horace: Epistulae, Book II, Ep.i, II. 156-7.

* See III. iii. 477-89.

1 Sec Herodotus, Book I, chap. 92.

* The Pontic Greek city-state that was thus forcibly honoured by Persian sovereigns
of the Cappadocian hinterland, who belonged to the post-AIexandrine dynasty founded
by the ex-satrap Ariarathes, had previously been paid the same two-edged compliment
by Datames, the moving spirit in the revolt of the western satraps against the Achae-
menian Imperial Government in 367 B.C. Before embarking on this abortive attempt to
carve out a Cappadocian successor-state of the Achnemenun Empire for himself, the
ambitious Carian empire-builder had occupied Sinope and made it the capital of his
ephemeral principality (see Olmstead, A. T.: History of the Persian Empire (Chicago
1948, University of Chicago Press), p. 412).

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 415
landlocked native city of Amasia 1 * that was hallowed by the rock-cut
tombs of Eupator’s Persian ancestors. Nor was the cultural radiation of
this subjugated colonial Greek city-state Sinope confined within the
frontiers of the Oriental kingdom which had incorporated Sinope in its
body politic. Across the breadth of Pontic Cappadocia the hinterland of
Sinope expanded inland into the adjoining sister Cappadocian successor-
state of the Achaemenian Empire in the interior of Eastern Anatolia;
and by the fourth century of the Christian Era the cumulative cultural
effect of an Hellenic influence which since Augustus’s day had been play¬
ing upon Cappadocia, not only from Sinope, but from a more powerful
though still more distant transmitting station at Ephesus, 1 had inspired
descendants of Persian feudal barons planted in Cappadocia in the
Achaemenian Age 3 to become the Attic-educated Cappadocian Fathers
of an Eastern Orthodox Christian Church.

These instances of cultural attraction exercised on barbarian, Syriac,
and Hittite hinterlands by politically subjugated maritime Hellenic city-
states give the same evidence as the role subsequently played by the
Hellenic deportee-settlement at Jund-i-Sh 3 pGr in the self-Hellcnization
of the Syriac World after the final liquidation of Hellenic rule on Syriac
ground. They testify to the operation of a social ‘law’ to the effect that,
in cultural encounters between contemporaries, the sensitiveness of the
receptivity of the heirs of an assaulted culture to the influence of an
impinging culture is apt to be in inverse ratio to the degree to which the
representatives of the impinging culture yield to the temptation of trying
to force an entry.

This law is likewise revealed in the history of the radiation of Hellenic
art, which travelled farther afield than Hellenic science or philosophy,
and much farther afield than Hellenic arms. An Hellenic Kingdom of
Macedon whose soldiers once marched eastward as far as the Panjab
never succeeded in permanently establishing its dominion over the
headwaters of its domestic rivers Axius and Strymon; yet the image and
superscription of coins minted in the Lower Strymon Basirt by Philip
the son of Amyntas in the fourth century B.c. had made their way before
the beginning of the Christian Era not only across the watershed between
Strymon and Danube but right across the Continent and over the
Channel into Britain. 4 Some four hundred years after Philip’s day, the
peacefully triumphal north-westward progress of his coin-types was
overtaken in Britain by the advance of the military frontier of a Roman-
built Hellenic universal state; but in the opposite direction the radiation

1 The writer of this Study spent the night of the 7th November, 1948, in Amasiaand
visited the royal tombs rn route for the summit of the citadel.

* See the passage in Strabo’s Geographica, Book XII, chap, ii, § to (c 54°). quoted in
IV. iv. 21, n. 2. The expanding commercial and cultural hinterlands of rival ports behave
like the expanding basins of rival rivers. Like a river, a port will capture territory from
a competitor by pushing back the commercial watershed and thereby diverting the flow
of trade from its rival to itself; but, unlike a river basin, in which the flow of water is in
one direction only—from the headwaters to the sea—the hinterland of a port is the field
of a two-way commercial and cultural traffic with an upward flow from coast to water¬
shed as well as a downward flow from watershed to coast.

* See VI. vii. 123-4.

4 See V. v. 196-8 and 482. The Philippan prototype did, however, 'suffer a sea change’
in the course of its journey to a British Ultima Thule.

4 i6 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
of Hellenic art far outshot the farthest reconnaissance of Alexander’s
or even Demetrius’s expeditionary force. After travelling eastward, in
the wake of Hellenic arms, from the Aegean to Gandhara, on the water¬
shed between the Oxus and the Indus, and establishing a new base of
pacific operations here under the aegis of Kushan barbarian successors
of Bactrian Greek war-lords, Hellenic art made a further and still longer
journey eastward from this second starting-point into a Sinic World into
which neither Greek nor Roman armies had ever penetrated, to become
the inspiration of the new art of a nascent Far Eastern Civilization. 1

The Epiphany of Higher Religions

The peaceful penetration of the Hellenic culture into regions never
trodden by Hellenic conquerors even at the high tide of Hellenic military
expansion teaches the same lesson as Hellenism’s posthumous artistic
and intellectual triumphs after the ebb of its dominion from territories
that Hellenic war-lords had once overrun and subjugated; and this
Hellenic lesson is illuminating for the general study of encounters
between civilizations that are one another’s contemporaries. That light
was visible to students of history in the generation of the writer of this
Study owing to the accident of their happening in this Hellenic case to
know the whole story—in contrast to the state of their knowledge of
current encounters with the Modern Western Civilization, in which a
flood of detailed information out of all proportion to the meagre surviv¬
ing records of Hellenic history was abruptly cut short, in the middle of
the story, by the iron curtain of Man’s insuperable ignorance of a still
uncreated future.

Whether the impotence of force in the cultural commerce between
contemporaries was one day to be illustrated in Modern Western history
as it had already been revealed in post-Alcxandrine Hellenic history was
a question that was still enigmatic in a.d. 1952; and this negative result
of a study of the encounters between his own society and its contem¬
poraries served to remind the Modern Western student of History that
those historical events that for him were the least remote, the best
documented, the most alive, and the most familiar were also therefore
the least illuminating for the purpose of his ultimate inquiry into the
general course and character of human affairs. 2 The more remote and
less fully documented history of encounters with an Hellenic Society,
which had become extinct not much less than thirteen hundred years
before the mid-twentieth-century student’s day, promised to teach him
more about the comparative effects, in encounters between contempor¬
aries, of the alternative tempers of violence and gentleness, and a
fortiori more about the outcome of such encounters on the religious
plane.

To a twentieth-century Western historian, looking back from his
historical vantage-point upon the long since completed history of
encounters with a post-Alexandrine Hellenism, it was evident that by
his day the spontaneous reception of Hellenic art in a fifth-century Sinic

1 See III. iii. 131 nnd 247. n. 2, and V. v. 134-j;. *q 6. and 482-3.

2 This point has already been noticed in 1 . 1. 30-37, and on p. 346 above.

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 417

World and of Hellenic science and philosophy in a ninth-century Syriac
World had gone the same way as the feats of Macedonian and Roman
arms during the last four centuries b.c. The artistic and intellectual, like
the military and political, transactions between a post-Alexandrine
Hellenism and its contemporaries were by this time a closed account
that was having no continuing effect on transactions in the twentieth-
century observer’s own age; but this was not to say that the life of
Mankind in the twentieth century of the Christian Era was not being
influenced at all by any effects of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism’s impact
on the world of its day. The continuing operation of this impact was
proclaimed in a twentieth-century world by the allegiance of an over¬
whelming majority of the living generation of Mankind to one or other
of four living religions—Christianity, Islam, the Mahayana, and Hindu¬
ism—whose historical epiphanies could be traced back to episodes in
a now extinct Hellenism’s encounters with now extinct Oriental civiliza¬
tions; and, if the future course of human affairs were to vindicate an
intuition 1 that the ‘universal churches’ embodying the ‘higher religions’
were not merely the latest type of human society that had made its
appearance up to date but were also an apter vehicle than either civiliza¬
tions or primitive societies for helping human beings to make their
pilgrim’s progress towards the goal of human endeavours, it would
follow that the encounters with a post-Alexandrine Hellenism shed a
light which the encounters with a Modern Western Civilization did not
shed upon the main theme of any general study of History.

When we surveyed the religious effects of the literally world-wide
impact of a Modern Western Civilization, we met with little evidence
here of the genesis of new higher religions comparable to those en¬
gendered by the virtually world-wide impact of a post-Alexandrine
Hellenism. In the history of encounters with the Modern Western
Civilization up to date, new higher religions, if discernible at all, proved
to be conspicuously rare and rudimentary; 1 and we did not find any
warrant for allowing ourselves to guess that this apparent religious
barrenness of a Modern Western internal proletariat might be an illusion,
arising from the prematurencss of our date of observation, which might
be dispelled by contrary evidence in still unwritten chapters of the story. 1
On this showing, we must conclude that, if the encounters between our
own Western Civilization and its contemporaries had been the only
instances known to us of encounters between contemporaries, we should
have remained ignorant of the most enduring and most significant of all
the effects which such encounters had once produced; and we must also
admit the possibility that the darkness of our understanding of History
would not be appreciably lightened even if we could live to read the
remaining chapters of the Modern Western story, and if the information
at Posterity’s disposal in these still outstanding chapters should prove
to be as abundant as in the chapters already in print. By contrast, our
fragmentary record of the story of encounters with a post-Alexandrine
Hellenism initiates us into the epiphany of a band of higher religions 4 —

* See VII. vii. 420-3. * See V. v. 174-6.

> See VII. vii. 414-19. * Sec V. v. 81-82, and xi, map 29.

4 iS ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the worship of Isis, the worships of Cybele and Iuppitcr Dolichcnus,
Mithraism and Christianity and Islam, the Mahayana and Hinduism—
which incidentally bear witness to Hellenism’s encounters with a
petrified Egyptiac, a fossilized I Iittite, a Syriac, and an Indie Civilization,
though the revelation that is these higher religions’ message is concerned,
not with the final cause of the species of human society called ‘civiliza¬
tions’, but with the will of God and with the goal of human endeavours.

The ecclesiastical institutions in which these higher religions had
come to be embodied had behaved like all human institutions in com¬
peting with one another; and, in this competition, all but the four last
on our list had ostensibly succumbed; but in truth these apparently
extinguished competitors were still living on in the life of victors who
had triumphed over them by taking over from them their distinctive
sparks of truth and life. For those who had eyes to see, a Mithraic vein
was discernible in the catholic tradition of a triumphant Mahayana,
and a Mithraic, Isiac, and Cybeline vein in the catholic tradition of a
triumphant Christianity. Unlike the military, political, intellectual,
and artistic offspring of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism’s encounters with
contemporary societies of its own species, the higher religions that had
made their epiphany in the course of those encounters were thus all still
alive and at work in a twentieth-century world that had been unified on
the technological plane by the ubiquitous expansion of a secular Modern
Western culture.

2. Encounters toith the Pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization 1
The Hellenic Society's Offensive in the Mediterranean Basin

The drama in which a pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Society was the
protagonist was performed in the same Mediterranean theatre that,
some eighteen hundred years later, was to be the scene of a play in
which a Medieval Western Christendom was to take the principal part;
and in both performances there were three actors on the stage. The two
rivals of a pre-Alexandrine Hellenism were the sister Syriac Society and
the fossilized remnant of a prematurely shattered Hittite Society which
had preserved its existence in the fastnesses of the Taurus. In the
competition between these three parties for the dominion of the Mediter¬
ranean Basin the Syriac Civilization was represented by the Phoenicians
and the Hittite by seafarers who, in the overseas territories in which they
won a footing, became known in Greek as Tyrrhenians and in Latin as
Etruscans to their Hellenic adversaries. 2

In this three-cornered contest, which opened in the eighth century
b.c., the prizes were the shores of the Western Basin of the Mediter¬
ranean, whose culturally backward native inhabitants were no match for
any of the three rival intruding societies; the shores of the Black Sea
opening on to the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe, which
gave access in turn to the arable belt of Black Earth along the Steppe’s
north-western fringe; and the long-since intensively cultivated land of

1 See xi, maps 18, 19, 20, 21.

J Sec I. i. 114 and II. ii. 85-86.

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM . 419

Egypt, where a civilization that had suffered the doom of Tithonus 1 had
reached by this time a stage of decrepitude in its state of living death at
which it could no longer keep one aggressive alien neighbour at bay
without enlisting the services of another to bolster up its own failing
strength.

In the struggle for these prizes the pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Civiliza¬
tion enjoyed several notable advantages over both its competitors.

Its most manifest advantage was geographical. The Hellenic base of
operations in the Aegean was closer to the Western Mediterranean, and
much closer to the Black Sea, than the Etruscan and Phoenician bases at
the eastern extremity of the Mediterranean were to either of these two
undeveloped maritime outlets for the Levant. Indeed, the Aegean
homeland of Hellenism lay right across the sca-route to the Black Sea
from the coasts of Cilicia and Syria, and it also commanded and
threatened the right flank of the Etruscan and Phoenician sea-route to
the West, whereas the Hellenes themselves could row straight from the
Aegean into the Dardanelles and could make an easy coasting voyage
from Corinth to Syracuse round the head of the Ionian Sea across the
Straits of Otranto, without in either venture running the risk of being
intercepted and attacked by their rivals.

The pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Society’s second advantage in this
competition lay in the head of population which it had accumulated as
the result of a victory of the Lowlands over the Highlands in the preced¬
ing chapter of Hellenic history; 1 for the consequent pressure of popula¬
tion on the means of subsistence in Hellas gave the Hellenes’ expansion
an explosive force and stimulated them to follow up the establishment
of trading posts overseas by making this new world into a Magna
Graccia through a rapid and intensive settlement of Hellenic agricultural
colonists on the land. Our scanty evidence gives the impression that
neither the Etruscans nor the Phoenicians had a comparable amount of
man-power to dispose of in this age; and it is at any rate clear that
neither of them in fact emulated the Hellenes’ achievement of making a
new world their own by colonizing it. The cautious Phoenicians kept
within the narrow bounds of their coastal trading-posts till the Cartha¬
ginians belatedly broke with Phoenician tradition by imposing their
rule on the native population of their North-West African hinterland
about half-way through the fifth century b.c. j The rash Etruscan settlers
on the west coast of Italy pushed on into the interior across the Appen-
nincs and into the Po Basin until lack of man-power brought their
advance to a halt at the southern foot of the Alps and there drew down
upon them the avalanche of a Celtic barbarian counter-attack. 4

The third advantage enjoyed by the Hellenes was, like the first, a

1 See VI. vii. 47-52. _ * See I. i. 24-25 and HI. iii. 120-1.

3 Sec Meyer, £.: Gnchichte dei AUertums, vol. iii. Part I (Stuttgart 1901, Cotta),
pp.681-2.

* See II. ii. 85 and II. ii. 276, 280, and 345. In terms of the overseas expansion of a
Modern Western World, the Greek settlements in Magna Graccia and Sicily may be
compared to the English settlements along the Atlantic seaboard of North America; the
Phoenician posts at key points in the Western Mediterranean to the Portuguese posts at
key points in the Indian Ocean; and the Etruscan conquests in Italy to the Spanish
conquests in Central and South America.

420 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
corollary of their geographical situation. The opening of the competition
between Etruscans, Phoenicians, and Hellenes in the Mediterranean in
the eighth century b.c. happened to coincide in date with the inaugura¬
tion by the Assyrian war-lord Tiglath-Pileser III (regnabat 746-727
b.c.) of the last and most devastating offensive in the third bout of
Assyrian militarism in South-Western Asia; 1 and the homelands of the
Phoenicians and Etruscans in Syria and South-Eastern Anatolia were
immediately exposed to the full fury of an Assyrian tornado which left
the homeland of the Hellenes in the Aegean unscathed. The surviving
Hittite principalities astride the Taurus in South-Eastern Anatolia were
annexed to the Assyrian dominions by Sargon (regnabat 722-705 b.c.);
and, after the Aramaean principalities in the interior of Syria had been
ground to powder, the maritime Phoenician city-states in their turn
were scarified by the Assyrian harrow. Sidon was annexed to the
Assyrian dominions in 677 B.C. and its former territory was converted
into an Assyrian province. 2 * The Isle of Tyre was besieged by the
Assyrians in 674-668 B.c., J and was probably annexed after the suppres¬
sion of a rebellion in 639-7 B.c. in the former Tyrian territory on the
mainland. 4 Of the four metropolitan Phoenician city-states, only Byblus
and Aradus retained their independence; 5 and their two conquered
sisters were not compensated economically for their political subjuga¬
tion by finding themselves incorporated into a continental empire that
extended eastwards from the coast of Syria into the interior of South-
Western Asia over the crest of Zagros on to the western rim of the
Iranian Plateau. Asshur’s South-West Asia, like Napoleon’s and like
Hitler’s Europe, was too severely damaged in the making, too short-lived,
and too incessantly mobilized for war ever to harvest the potential
economic fruits of a violently enforced political unification.

Considering these handicaps, it is remarkable that the Phoenicians
and Etruscans should have done as well as they did in their maritime
competition with the Hellenes. In the race for the Black Sea the
geographical advantage was indeed so overwhelmingly on the Hellenes’
side that here their competitors were decisively defeated. Traces of a
Phoenician settlement on the island of Thasos off the north shore of
the Aegean, 6 and traces of Tyrrhenian settlements on the island of
Lemnos, off the Aegean entrance to the Dardanelles, and at two points,
inside the Dardanelles, on the Asiatic coast of the Sea of Marmara, 7 are
evidence of a struggle in this arena which ended in a decisive and defini¬
tive Hellenic victory. The Black Sea became an Hellenic lake; and, in

1 See IV. iv. 475-6.

* Sec Forrcr, E.: Die Provimeinleilung dei Assyritchen Rtichtt (Leipzig 1920. Hin-

richs), p. 65. 3 See ibid., p. 66.

4 See ibid., pp. 66-67. * See ibid., p. 67.

6 Talcs of ancient Phoenician settlements in the Hellenic Society’s eventual domain

were, of course, commonplaces of Hellenic legend, and, in so far as they were to be
credited at all, they were perhaps in most cases to be interpreted as echoes, in a post-
Minoan folk-memory, of Minoan enterprise in an age before the dawn of Hellenic his¬
tory and long before the intrusion of any authentic Phoenicians into Hellenic waters.
In Thasos, on the other hand, the genuineness of the talc of a Phoenician settlement seemed
to be attested by the attachment of the Semitic name Cabeiri (‘the Great (GodsJ’j to
divinities worshipped in an historic Thasian cult.

7 Sec I. i. 114, n. 3, and I. i. 411-15.

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 421
the period of quiescence on the Steppe after the eruption of the Cim¬
merian and Scythian Nomads at the turn of the eighth and seventh
centuries b.c., 1 the Hellenic masters of the Black Sea and the Scythian
masters of the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe 2 entered into
a profitable commercial partnership in which the cereal harvests raised
by the Scythians’ sedentary subjects on the Black Earth were exported
overseas to feed Hellenic urban populations in the Aegean in exchange
for luxury goods of Hellenic manufacture designed to suit the Royal
Scythians’ taste. 3

In the Western Mediterranean, where the balance of geographical
advantage was less heavily weighted in the Hellenes’ favour, the struggle
lasted longer and went through many more vicissitudes before it ended,
here too, in an Hellenic victory.

In the first round in the eighth century B.c. both the Etruscans and
the Phoenicians managed to forge ahead of the Hellenes, in spite of the
greater distance of their Levantine bases from the western scene of
operations and in defiance of the ever impending Hellenic threat to the
right flank of their long-drawn-out line of maritime communications,
where the route ran between Libya and Crete. The Etruscans must have
slipped through the Straits of Messina to establish themselves along the
west coast of Italy between the mouths of the Tiber and the Arno before
the Hellenes had closed the Straits by planting the toe of Italy on one
side and the western seaboard of Sicily on the other with a serried array
of colonial Greek city-states. The Phoenicians succeeded in resisting
all Hellenic attempts to wrest out of Phoenician hands a command
of the wider maritime passage westward between Cape Bon and the
western tip of Sicily, which Phoenician pioneers had brought under their
control by planting a Sicilian outpost at Motye 4 over against North-
West African outposts at Utica and Carthage. In the ensuing phases
of the struggle the overseas Phoenicians and the overseas Tyrrhenians
alike achieved a self-sufficiency that neutralized the advantage enjoyed
by the Hellenes in holding the interior lines and discounted the loss
that the Levantine seafarers suffered when the harrowing of their
parent societies in South-West Asia by the Assyrians deprived them
of all prospect of receiving any appreciable further reinforcements
from home.

The balance of advantage continued nevertheless to incline so heavily
in the Hellenes’ favour that, throughout the seventh century B.c. and
the first half of the sixth, they went from strength to strength. The

* See III. iii. 410 and VI. vii.580-689.

1 For the Scythian empire baaed on the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe,
see III. iii. 25, n. 8, and 428-30.

1 Sec III. iii. 429. In the Ions history of a Medieval Western Christendom’s ex¬
pansion over the Mediterranean Basin and its backwaters, the trade between the Greek
settlements on the north shore of the Black Sea and the Royal Scythians had its counter¬
part in a trade between Venetian and Genoese settlements on the same coast and the
Golden Horde. During the first phase of the Mamluk regime in Egypt, when the Mam-
luks were importing their slave-successors from the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian
Steppe and not, as in the second phase, from the Caucasus, the Venetians were the prin¬
cipal carriers of this valuable human freight.

♦ They also planted two further posts, beyond the north-western comer of the island,
at Panormus (Palermo) and Soloeis, towards the western end of the north coast.

422 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
colonization of Cyrenaica in and after circa 639 B.c. 1 gave them a com¬
mand of the Libyan as well as the Cretan flank of the sea-passage
between the Levant and the Western Mediterranean which might have

E roved a decisive factor in the struggle if the overseas Phoenicians and
truscans had not already learnt to dispense with support from their
original bases of operations. The foundation in 580 b.c., on the grand
scale, of the new colonial Greek city-state Akragas {Latinh Agrigentum)
filled the last gap in a chain of Greek settlements along the south coast
of Sicily which thenceforth stretched without a break from Syracuse to
a Selinus that had been planted in 628 b.c. on the threshold of the
Phoenician outpost at the island’s western tip. The foundation circa
600 b.c. of Massilia (Marseilles)—on the brink of the nearest natural
harbour to the delta of the Rh6ne that was out of range of the choking
discharge of the delta-building silt—gave the Hellenes the command of
the most magnificent of all the natural avenues leading from the shores
of the Mediterranean into the interior of Europe. 2 The accidental dis¬
covery, circa 638 b.c., 3 by the Samian merchant-adventurer Colaeus,
of the ‘at that time still virgin market' 4 of Tartessus (Tarshish), on the
Iberian shore of the Mediterranean’s estuary into the Atlantic beyond
the Straits of Gibraltar, promised to give the Hellenes a monopoly of
trade with a source of mineral wealth that was a dazzling reward for their
being some three-quarters of a century behind the Phoenician founders
of Gades (Cadiz) in the long race from the Levant to the Pillars of
Hercules.

Even in the shorter race for Egypt, which was the one goal out of
the three for which the maritime competitors were contending where the
advantage of geographical proximity did not lie with the Hellenes, the
seventh century saw the Hellenes carry off the prize. The Hellenes
outstripped their rivals here likewise, in spite of their geographical
handicap, because they were in a position to supply a now fanatically
xenophobc Egyptiac Society with the one service that it was still
willing perforce to purchase from alien hands. An Egypt that was up in
arms against an atrocious Assyrian conqueror required alien mercenary
troops to help it to shake off a yoke which it was too feeble to shake off

, 1 ~, we fo,,0 , w Eusebius in dating the foundation of Cyrene itself circa 631 b.c., the
first Theracan landing on the Libyan islet of Plates will have been made circa 639 b.c.
according to the chronology given by Herodotus in Book IV, chaps. 156-8.

1 The avenue from Marseilles ur> the courses of the Rh6ne and the Safine led direct
to a g«p between the Jura and the Vosges that gave access to the upper valleys of both
the Rhine and the Danube (see II. ii. 330). The only other river-route from the Mediter¬
ranean into the interior of Europe that could remotely compare with the Rh6ne Valiev
avenue was the route up the Vardar (Gratei Axius) and down the Morava iLatini
Margus) to the south bank of the Middle Danube above the Iron Gates, adjoining the
south-east comer of the AlfOld. This route, which, in the first generation of Alexander's
successors, was to be provided, by Cassander’s insight, with an adequate port through
his foundation of Thcssalomca, was inadequately served in the prc-Alcxandrine Age
by the more securely but less conveniently situated Greek colonial settlements at Olyn-
thus and Methone. Compared with the open roads up the valleys of the Rhfine and the
vardar, the Alpine portages into the Danube Basin from the head of the Adriatic were
arduous, though they were sufficiently convenient to make the successive fortunes of
Aquilcia, Venice, and Trieste.

of Plates dalC W * S " fCW m0n,h * “ fter ,he Thcracan *’ landing on the Libyan island
4 T ° aWpto* 1 roCro fjv atcf)parov roGrov rov xpovov.—Herodotus, Book IV, chap.

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 423

by its own exertions; and a role which the Egyptians' Anatolian
and Syrian fellow victims of Assyrian militarism were powerless to
play, even if they had had the will, was left to Ionian and Carian
‘brazen men’ from the sea whom the Pharaoh-Liberator Psammetichus
I (regnabat 663/655-610 B.c. 1 ) enlisted for the task of expelling the
Assyrian garrisons from the Lower Nile Valley in the years 658-651 B.c. 2

Towards the middle of the sixth century b.c. it looked as if the
Hellenes had not only won their maritime competition for the Mediter¬
ranean Basin with the Etruscans and Phoenicians but were now also in
a fair way to inheriting the Assyrians' continental empire in Egypt and
South-West Asia. Circa 696 b.c., nearly half a century before Psam-
metichus’s Hellenic mercenaries turned the Assyrians out of Egypt,
Sennacherib had been incensed by an audacious insurrection of inter¬
loping Hellenic ‘brazen men’ from the sea on the Cilician 3 coast of his
dominions; and it looks as if the Assyrian Empire’s Neo-Babylonian
successor-state followed the example of its Egyptian successor-state in
hiring Hellenic fighting-men, if we may assume that other Hellenic
soldiers of fortune served in Nebuchadnezzar’s bodyguard besides a
Lesbian Antimenidas whose name and record happen to have been saved
from oblivion by the accident of his having been a brother of the poet
Alcaeus.

The Syriac Society’s Political Consolidation for Self-Defence

This employment of Hellenic troops in a South-West Asian Empire
whose native Chaldacan warriors were far better military material than
the drones of Libyan descent, who were doing duty for a native military
caste in a contemporary Egypt, 4 was an augury of a future Hellenic
ascendancy over a fallen Assyrian Empire’s former domain; and indeed
the Hellenes’ footing in Egypt and South-West Asia on the eve of the
establishment of the Achaemenian Empire was not less favourable than
their footing there on the eve of the Achaemenian Empire’s fall some
two hundred years later, when Hellenic mercenaries were not only once
more the mainstay of a once more precariously independent Egypt, but
were also being employed by loyal as well as by rebel Persian provincial
governors and even by the Achaemenian Emperor himself. In the fourth

1 Psammetichus was installed as vassal prince of Lower Egypt by Asshurbanipal in
663 B.C. and had established his authority over Thebes by 635 b.c.

J See IV. iv. 21 and 476, and V. v. 463.

J In Sennacherib’s day the name ’Cilicia’ had not yet been extended to the plain of
Adana (Qu’c) and the rock-bound coast to the east of it, but was still confined to the
inland province Khilakku, north of the Taurus, round the city eventually named
Caesarea Mazaca (i.e. the district of the post-AIexandrine Kingdom of Inland Cappa¬
docia that was still officially known as Cilicia after the name had shifted, in the popular
usage, to the country south of the mountains). This shift in the popular application of the
name was the consequence of a change in political geography which followed Assyria’s
collapse. After having been an Assyrian protectorate and even an Assyrian province
(Forrcr, £.: Die Provinzeinleilung des Atiyrischen Reichei (Leipzig 1920, Hinrichs), pp.
74 and 82), the principality of Khilakku not only recovered its independence but pro¬
ceeded to expand to the coast of the Mediterranean by annexing Qu’e (Forrcr, loc. cit.,
and the present Study, VI. vii. 668), as, some seventeen hundred years later, the same
desirable lowland country was annexed by a refugee Armenian principality which had
established itself in the highlands adjoining the Cappadocian Cilicia on the east (see
p. 369, above). * See IV. iv. 422.

424 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

century B.c. the Hellenes duly achieved their manifest destiny; but in
the sixth century this destiny, imminent though it then already appeared
to be, was abruptly postponed for two hundred years by a sudden turn
of the wheel of Fortune.

The employment of Greek mercenaries by the Neo-Babylonian war¬
lord Nebuchadnezzar becomes comprehensible when we remind our¬
selves that the warlike spirit of the Chaldaean tribesmen—as well as the
tincture of Assyrian militarism which even the sedentary rural and
urban population of Babylonia had perhaps momentarily acquired from
the harsh experience of a hundred-years-long struggle for life against an
atrocious Assyrian aggressor 1 —was rapidly evaporating under the de¬
pressing influence of a new anxiety. The Babylonians’ agonizing Assyrian
nightmare had promptly returned in the new guise of a threat of being
encircled and eventually engulfed by the Median hordes who had been
the Babylonians’ allies in a common struggle against Assyrian enemies
of the Human Race. When, circa 550 b.c., this Median cloud, banked
on Zagros, that was now overhanging South-West Asia, was swollen to
still more menacing dimensions by a sudden transfer of the hegemony
over the restless tribes of Iran from the Medes to the Persians, the
stricken peoples that had been enjoying a spell of uneasy freedom and
peace since the downfall of the Assyrian Power were confronted with a
choice between two new candidates for oecumenical dominion. If they
were to stem the threatening deluge of Persian conquest from the
Iranian Plateau, they must open the sluices to an infiltration of Hellenic
mercenary man-power from the Mediterranean.

Either of the two candidates for taking the Assyrians’ vacant place
had something less uninviting than an Assyrian tyranny to offer. The
Persians promised to a convalescent world the rest-cure of an oecumeni¬
cal peace whose easy-going semi-barbarian conservators would be more
inclined to adopt their subjects’ institutions and ideas 2 than to impose
their own. 3 The Hellenes promised to the patient the shock-treatment
of rejuvenation through the impact of an adolescent society whose zest
for adventure had not yet been quenched by any taste of the South-
West Asian peoples’ crushing experience of passing under an Assyrian
harrow'. At this turning-point in the history of a pre-Alexandrine Hellenic
Society’s relations with its neighbours, the ghost of an Asshur who in
his lifetime had inadvertently played the Hellenes’ game by paralysing
their Levantine competitors for the thalassocracy of the Mediterranean,
tipped the balance of choice against the Hellenic candidate for Asshur’s
political heritage by moving the victimized peoples, whose memories the
Assyrian spectre haunted, to opt for a political sedative in preference to
a political stimulant. 4

I See IV. iv. 476-80.

in \' T v C rccep,ivity of ,hc Pcraian builders of the Achaemcnian Empire has been noticed

3 See VI. vu. 580-689. The forbearance shown by the Achaemenidae in refraining
trom making use of their political power for the propagation of a Zoroastrianism to which
they themselves had become converts has been noticed in V. v. 704-5.

« The majority of these peoples acquiesced in the sedative merely as a pit oiler, as was
demonstrated in the event by the general insurrection of most of the subject peoples
east of Euphrates in the year of anarchy following the assassination of the Emperor

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 425

In this political atmosphere the Hellenes’ sixth-century prospects in
Egypt and South-West Asia were blotted out within the twenty years or
so that elapsed between Cyrus’s conquest of the Lydian Empire circa
547 b.c. and Cambyses’ conquest of Egypt circa 525 b.c. 1 Cyrus’s stroke,
which substituted an outlandish Persian for a familiar Lydian suzerainty
over the Hellenic city-states along the western seaboard of Anatolia,
was the sharper as well as the more surprising of the two; but Cambyses’
conquest of Egypt dealt the Hellenes a further double blow; for, besides
depreciating the military prestige of'brazen men’ who had failed to earn
their keep by preserving Egypt’s independence, it placed Greek com¬
mercial interests in Egypt at the mercy of Persian goodwill. Moreover,
these reverses that the rapid establishment of an Achaemenian Empire
inflicted on the Hellenes were accentuated by the no less signal and
sudden benefits which the same swift transformation of the political
scene conferred upon the Syrophoenicians.

To the peoples of Syria the establishment of the Achaemenian Empire
brought not merely a rest-cure but a liberation and an opportunity; for
Syria, unlike either Egypt or Babylonia, had obtained no respite from
Assyria’s fall. She had become the prey of a Neo-Babylonian successor-
state of the Assyrian Empire; and her new conquerors, into whose souls
the iron of Assyrian militarism had entered, had taken a vicarious revenge
for their sufferings at a now slain Asshur’s hands by treating their
former fellow victims in Syria with an Assyrian harshness. Indeed,
those few Syrian communities that had survived the Assyrian whips had
been subjected by the Babylonians to a chastisement with scorpions.
The fate of being carried into captivity, which Judah had escaped when
Sennacherib had unsuccessfully laid siege to Jerusalem in 700 b.c., had
overtaken her when Jerusalem had fallen to Nebuchadnezzar in the
successive Babylonian sieges of 597 and 586 B.c.; and the Babylonian
siege of 586-573 b.c. had proved a worse catastrophe for Tyre than the
Assyrian siege of 674-668. The destruction of the Neo-Babylonian
Empire by Cyrus gave the Babylonians’ Syrian subjects a relief that
their neighbours had been enjoying since the destruction of Assyria;
and in this long-delayed reversal of Syrian fortunes the Phoenician
experience was even more dramatic than the Jewish.

While the Jew's were allowed by the new Persian rulers of the Syriac
World to return home from their Babylonian exile and to reconstruct
Judah in the modest form of an autonomous temple-state, the four
Syrophoenician cities were given, not merely autonomy for themselves,
but a dominion, under Achaemenian suzerainty, over other Syrian com¬
munities 1 that placed them on at least a par, in both extent of territory

Cambyses’ successor on the Achaemenian imperial throne, and by the repeated sub¬
sequent revolts of both the Babylonians and the Egyptians against Achaemenian rule.
On the whole, however, the Persians managed first to establish and afterwards to
maintain their empire without evoking anything like the resistance from the subject
peoples that these Persian subjects’ ancestors had once offered to their Persian rulers’
Assyrian predecessors. The Persians profited by the Assyrians’ ferocity', which had
broken the South-West Asian peoples’ spirit before the Persians came on the scene, as
well as by the comparatively unprovocative mildness of their own Achaemenian regime.

1 These are A. T. Olmstead’s dates in his History oj the Persian Empire (Chicago 1948,
University of Chicago Press), pp. 37 and 88. 1 See V. v. 123, n. 2.

B 2898 .vuj P 2

426 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
and quantity of population, with the most powerful of the independent
city-states of a contemporary Hellenic World: an Athens, an Akragas,
a Syracuse, and perhaps even a Sparta. Moreover, the political benefits
thus bestowed on the Syrophoenicians were matched by their economic
gains from an Achacmcnian new order. The Syrophoenicians now found
themselves partners in a commonwealth which stretched away inland
from the Syrian coast of the Mediterranean into the interior of South-
West Asia not merely up to the eastern slopes of the Zagros, like the
Assyrian Empire, or up to the Zagros' western foot-hills, like the closer-
cropped Neo-Babylonian Empire, but as far as the almost fabulously
distant north-eastern outposts of Homo Agricola in KhwSrizm 1 and
FarghSnah, 1 on the dry shore of the Great Eurasian Steppe. Under
a stable and pacific Achaemcnian regime this vast area had become the
Syrophoenicians’ continental economic hinterland; and, with the united
forces of the Achaemcnian Empire behind them, they could hope to win
a comparable opening for their maritime trade by recovering the lion’s
share in the commerce of the Mediterranean which the Hellenes had
captured from them while the Assyrians and Babylonians had been
attacking them from the landward side. In Phoenician, as in Jewish, eyes
the Achaemenian Empire was a heaven-sent instrument for the reinstate¬
ment of a chosen people in its rightful place in the sun; and it might be
anticipated that, if archaeological enterprise were one day to bring to
light a Tyrian counterpart of Deutcro-Isaiah’s tract, the Tyrian worship¬
per of Melkart would prove, like the Jewish worshipper of Yahweh, to
have hailed Cyrus as the Lord’s Anointed.

The Jews never had occasion to use the Achaemenian Empire as the
instrument of an anti-Hellenic national policy, for the temple-state of
Jerusalem, in its secluded inland fastness, did not come into collision
with Hellenism till about 160 years after the overthrow of the Achacmen-
ian Empire by Alexander the Great; but the Achaemcnian Empire did
perform this service for the Syrophoenicians. In political partnership
with the Persians they were able at last once again to face on equal, and
more than equal, terms the Hellenic competitors who had been pushing
them from pillar to post for the past 150 years. For the Phoenicians in
their struggle with the Hellenes, union was the key to strength; and this
strength through union, which had come to the Syrophoenicians as a
Persian windfall, had already been acquired by their Libyphocnician
colonists through Punic self-help.

Instead of waiting, like their cousins on the Syrian seaboard, for a
semi-barbarian empire-builder to save them, the colonial Phoenician
communities in the Western Mediterranean had saved themselves by
accepting the leadership of one of their own number, Carthage, and by
entering into an alliance with the Etruscans, whose field of enterprise did
not overlap with theirs and who were likewise under pressure from the
Hellenes’ continuing westward expansion. This expansion had not
ended with the Rhodians’ foundation of Akragas in 580 B.c. The
Phocaeans had followed up their foundation of Massilia by planting

1 The land of the Chorasmians (Hvirazmiy).

1 The land of the Paricaniana (Pairikii).

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 427

a chain of posts along the east coast of the Iberian Peninsula and, circa
566 b.c., 1 a colony at Alalia on the east coast of Corsica which served a
twofold purpose by providing both a port of call en route for Massilia
and a naval base for blockading Etruria. The foundation of Akragas had,
however, been immediately followed by the first signal Hellenic reverse
at Phoenician hands. An attempt, led by the Cnidian adventurer
Pentathlus, to push the Phoenicians out of their all-important foothold
at the western tip of Sicily by planting an Hellenic settlement at the
strategic point Lilybaeum, commanding the harbour of Motye, was
defeated—apparently without Carthaginian aid 2 —by the combined
efforts of the Sicilian Phoenicians and the local natives; 3 and, when the
surviving Cnidian adventurers succeeded in establishing themselves on
the uninviting Lipari islands in lieu of the Sicilian vantage-point which
they had failed to win, they found themselves harried here by the
Etruscans.

Lilybaeum's destiny was to become, not an Hellenic city-state, but
a Carthaginian fortress; for the Carthaginian empire-builders’ first step
was to establish their hegemony over their fellow Phoenician settlers on
the coasts of Sicily, North-West Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula before
going into partnership with the Etruscans. The Hellenes’ two maritime
rivals were soon confronted with a formidable new Hellenic threat by
a backwash from the empire-building activities of Cyrus. After conquer¬
ing Lydia, Cyrus summoned the Continental Asiatic Greek communities
that had been under Lydian suzerainty to transfer their allegiance to
him, and the Phocacans—though they had previously refused the offer

of a new home in Tarshish 4 —responded to the Persian challenge by
migrating en masse to their existing Corsican settlement at Alalia. 5 Here
they made themselves so intolerable to Etruscans and Carthaginians
alike as to provoke within five years a Tyrrheno-Carthaginian joint
attack in which the Phocaeans won a battle 6 but lost the war owing to the
crippling casualties suffered by their navy. The surviving victors had to
evacuate Corsica and make a new home for themselves at Vclia, far down
the west coast of Italy. 7 Meanwhile the majority of the Ionians, who, un¬
like the stalwart minority of the Phocaeans, had stayed at home and had
been constrained to submit to a Persian suzerainty, had been discussing

1 i.c. twenty years before the Phocaeans migrated to Alalia en matte (Herodotus,
Book I, chap. 10$).

2 See Dunbabin, T. J.: The Western Greeks (Oxford 1948, Clarendon Press), p. 332.

2 There is no reason to suppose that these 'Elymi’ were not of the same origin and

nationality as their diversely named native neighbours the ‘Sicana’ and ’SiceL’. Each
swarm of Greek settlers in Sicily found a local name for the native population on whose
territory it was trespassing. The name ‘Elymi’ may have been coined for the natives of
North-Eastern Sicily by some Cnidian or Rhodian Greek settler at Selinfls or Akragas
whose nearest non-G reek-speaking neighbours at home had been the Lycian ‘Solymi’.

4 See Herodotus, Book f, chap. 163. _

1 The resolute migrants were a minority. A majority succumbed to homesickness and
turned back to regain their Asiatic home at the price of submitting to a Persian yoke
(Herodotus, Book I, chap. 165).

* The date of this decisive naval battle at Alalia is usually taken to have been circa
535 B.C.; but, if Cyrus conquered Lydia in 547 b.c. (see Olmstcad, A. T.: History oj the
Persian Empire (Chicago 1948, University of Chicago Press), p. 40). and if his summons
to the Continental Asiatic Greeks and the consequent migration of the Phocaeans to
Corsica followed immediately after, this would indicate circa 541-540 B.c. as the date of
the Battle of Alalia. ’ See Herodotus, Book I, chaps. « 64 ~ 7 -

428 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
a project submitted by Bias of Priene for escaping from their new sub¬
jection by migrating en masse to Sardinia, 1 and this suggestion was
revived some fifty years later, during the last agonies of the Ionian
Revolt of 499-493 B.C., by the irresponsible-minded Milesian insurgent
leader Aristagoras; 1 * but, even at the date when Bias first mooted the
idea, the Hellenes had probably already been forestalled in Sardinia by
the Carthaginians.

We know that the Carthaginian empire-builders concentrated their
efforts on the conquest of Sardinia as soon as they had made sure of their
hold upon the original Phoenician establishments in Western Sicily; and,
though the dates of the successive stages in the execution of their grand
design are obscure, 1 the terms of the Carthagino-Roman treaty of
circa 508 B.C. 4 suggest that the structure of the Carthaginian Empire was
by then already complete. By the terms of the Carthagino-Etruscan
alliance that had borne fruit in the allies’ lucrative defeat at Alalia,
Sardinia had probably been included in a Carthaginian, and Corsica in
an Etruscan, sphere of influence; 5 and, after securing a sufficiently firm
grip on the coasts of Sardinia to be able to rule out any possibility of a
Greek settlement there, the Carthaginian empire-builders turned west¬
ward. They occupied the Balearic Islands; crushed the Kingdom of
Tarshish; 6 wiped out the Phoenician Gades’ Hellenic rival Mainake,
the south-westernmost Phocaean outpost on the south-east coast of the
Iberian Peninsula in the neighbourhood of Malaga; 7 and drew a wooden
curtain across the southern half of the Western Mediterranean from
Cape Nao to Cape Bon through the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and the
West Sicilian bridgehead of the Carthaginian dominions. In this Tunic
Main’ and its Iberian and North-West African hinterlands, Hellenic
shipping was thenceforth forbidden to ply and Hellenic wares could not
be marketed except through Punic middlemen; 8 and this barred zone
remained effectively closed to Hellenic commerce for a quarter of a
millennium, 9 till the Punic monopoly was eventually broken by force of

1 See Herodotus, Book I, chap. 170. * See Herodotus, Book V, chap. 124.

J Dunbabin, op. cit., pp. 332-3, tentatively dates the establishment of Carthaginian

rule in Western Sicily before the fall of Tyre in 573 B.C.; but Orosius, Adversum
Paganos, Book IV, chap, vi, §§ 6-9, who is the only surviving Hellenic author to give
any indication of a date, assigns not only the operations in Sicily but also the first opera¬
tions in Sardinia 'temporibus Cyri Persarum regis’.

4 See Polybius, Book III, chap. 2. s See Dunbabin, op. cit., p. 344.

6 Sec Carpenter, Rhys: The Creeks in Spain (Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 192s, Bryn

Mawr College), pp. 31-32; Dunbabin, op. cit., p. 344.

7 Sec Carpenter, op. cit., pp. 20-30.

8 See Karstcdt, U.: Geschiehle der Karthagtr von szS-146 (Berlin 1913, Weidmann),
PP- 71 - 73 - , .

r 9 f xc,US!0n the Hellenes by Carthaginian force of arms from a once lucrative
field of Phocaean enterprise in the South-Western Mediterranean and the Atlantic was
accepted by the Hellenic World as an accomplished fact with a resignation that cx-
pressed itself in a symbolic usage of the phrase ‘Pillars of Hercules’ to signify the limit
of what was attainable by human endeavour. By Pindar's day this piece of symbolism
had already become proverbial, though Pindar (vivebat circa 52J-450 D.c.) had been
bom before the erection of the Carthaginian ‘wooden curtain’ had been completed.
I he third of Pindar’s Olympian Odes—written to celebrate a victory gained at the
Olympian Games in 476 B.c. by Th*r6n, the despot of Akragas, who had shared with
Hiero of Syracuse the distinction of defeating the Carthaginian attempt to conquer
Sicily in 480 B.C. ends with the celebrated words: ‘And now Thfrfln in his achieve¬
ments has arrived at the limit. He has completed the long voyage from his home port

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 429
Roman arms in a struggle that took two generations (gerebatur 263-201
b.c.) to reach its final decision.

A simultaneous Etruscan endeavour to harvest the fruits of the Battle
of Alalia by making an Etruscan mare clausum out of the Tyrrhene Sea
was not carried to a similarly successful conclusion. An Etruscan attempt
to conquer the Hellenes’ Campanian outpost, Cumae, was defeated in
524 b . c . ; and, though the Etruscans nevertheless managed to retain a
footing in Campania thereafter, their prospects of asserting their
hegemony south of the Tiber were blighted by Rome’s successful revolt
against an Etruscan domination circa 508 b . c . Yet, even so, the total set¬
back suffered by the Hellenes in the Western Mediterranean in the
course of the generation following the Battle of Alalia was severe, and
the disastrous failure of a last attempt to turn the tide again compelled
them to recognize the hard fact that Carthaginian statesmanship had
brought their westward advance to a halt against an insurmountable
military barrier. When the Spartan King Clcomenes I’s brother Dorieus
tried, circa 514-512 b . c ., 1 to emulate in Africa the achievement of the
founders of Selinus and Akragas in Sicily by extending the belt of con¬
tinuous Hellenic settlement from Cyrenaica into Tripolitania on the
threshold of the cluster of Libyphoenician communities in Tunisia, the
Carthaginians turned this Hellenic interloper out; and, when, circa
511-508 b . c ., Dorieus tried, as an alternative, to emulate the Cnidian
Pentathlus’s supremely provocative attempt to wrest the western tip of
Sicily out of the hands of the Carthaginians and their local Phoenician
and Elymian subjects by establishing a Greek settlement at Eryx, the
Spartan adventurer met his Cnidian predecessor’s fate.*

Thus, before the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries b . c ., the expan¬
sion of the Hellenic World had been arrested in all directions by political
combinations on the grand scale between the threatened members of
competing societies; and it might now have been expected that the
hitherto mobile eastern and western frontiers between an Hellenic and
a Syriac World would settle down along the lines that Achaemenian and
Carthaginian empire-builders had so firmly drawn. There seemed no
reason why the former victims of Hellenic aggression should not remain
content with their decisive success in bringing this aggression to a halt,
or why the Hellenes, on their side, should not succeed in adapting them¬
selves to this adverse change in their political fortunes by carrying
through an economic revolution towards which a sixth-century Athens

to the Pillars of Hercules. What lies beyond is out of reach for sage and fool alike, and
I am not the man to commit the folly of seeking to attain the unattainable.’

This despondent Hellenic Neplui ultra was, of course, much to the taste of the Cartha¬
ginians. whom it left in unchallenged possession of their exclusive commercial empire.
After the Carthaginian monopoly of 'the barred zone’ had been finally broken by tho
Romans through their victory in the Hannibalic War, seventeen more centuries were to
pass before a Western Christendom, at the dawn of the Modem Age of its history’, was
to cap the Phocaean explorer Colaeus’s feat of discovering Tarshish by making the tran-
$!t of the Atlantic from Tarshish to the Antilles. This discovery of a New World, by
which Modem Western Man was so lavishly rewarded for his audacity in defying a
Pindaric veto, was characteristically commemorated by the minting of Spanish coins
displaying the two Pillars of Hercules crossed by a scroll on which the exultant counter¬
motto Plus Ultra was defiantly inscribed; and this image and superscription ultimately
gave birth to the United States dollar sign $ (sec XII. ix. 643, with n. 3).

* Sec Dunbabin, op. cit., p. 349. a See ibid., p. 354.

430 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

had already shown the way by deliberately changing over from an
‘extensive’ economy of mixed farming for subsistence to an ‘intensive’
economy of specialized production for exchange against imports of raw
materials and foodstuffs. A solution for the general Hellenic problem of
pressure of population that had been worked out locally in one Hellenic
city-state, which had happened to let slip her opportunity of joining in
the seventh-century race for virgin lands to colonize overseas, offered an
opportune means of economic salvation for a Hellas whose geographical
expansion had been arrested in the course of the sixth century b.c. by the
success of her rivals’ political counter-measures. 1

The Achaemenian Empire's Counter-Offensive

Evidently there were elements in the situation at the close of the sixth
century B.c. on both sides that told in favour of a stabilization of the
equilibrium between Hellenic and Syriac forces in which a sixth-century
struggle between the two societies had resulted; yet, in the event, this
equilibrium was upset almost as soon as the fifth century b.c. had
entered on its course. How was the historian to account for this surpris¬
ingly unhappy denouement? An Hellenic student of human affairs
would have found the cause of the calamity in some act of hybris, and a
Modern Western inquirer might accept this Hellenic explanation in
terms of Human Nature without leaving out of account the contributor}'
effect of a fatality in the geographical setting of this tragedy.

The human cause of the renewal of the conflict between the Hellenes
and their neighbours in the fifth century b.c. was an error in Achaemen¬
ian statesmanship; and this error was a miscalculation into which empire-
builders arc prone to fall when they have made sensationally wide and
rapid conquests over populations that have proved easy game because
their spirit has already been broken by previous harrowing experiences.
In such circumstances the successful empire-builders are apt to attribute
their success entirely to their own prowess, without recognizing their
debt to forerunners whose ruthless ploughshares have broken the soil
before the eventual empire-builders’ arrival on the scene to reap their
easy harvest; and an overweening self-confidence bred by this mistaken
belief in their own invincibility then leads the successful empire-builders
on to court disaster by rashly attacking still unbroken peoples whose
spirit and capacity for resistance take them by surprise. This is the
story of the disaster suffered in Afghanistan in a . d . 1838 - 42 2 by British
conquerors of the derelict domain of a broken-down Mughal Raj in
India who had light-heartedly assumed that the unscathed highlanders
of Eastern Iran would submit to them as tamely as the stricken popula¬
tion of a sub-continent whose demoralizing experience of five centuries
of alien rule had been crowned by the agony of a century of anarchy. 5
The same unpleasant surprise awaited Alexander the Great when, after
his swift and easy conquest of the passive main body of the Achaemenian
Empire west of the Caspian Gates, he set himself to subjugate the barons

1 See I. i. 24-25J II. ii. 38-42; and III. iii. 122; IV. iv. 200-14; IX. xi. 387.

3 This British disaster in Afghanistan has been touched upon on pp. 220 and 231,
* bove - 1 Sec xi, maps 44, 45, 52, 52A, 53.

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 43 x
of Khurasan and Transoxania, whose spirit had been kept alive by their
active service as wardens of the Syriac World’s north-eastern marches
over against the Eurasian Steppe. 1

The winning of the voluntary allegiance of these spirited Iranian
marchmen was the one great political achievement of the Achaemenian
empire-builders outside the limits of the broad field within which the
ground had been prepared for them by the ruthlessncss of their Assyrian
forerunners; and here too the Achaemenidae were assisted in their
political task by local anxieties springing from painful recollections. The
sedentary Iranian peoples to the north-east of the Caspian Gates had
felt the full fury of a Cimmerian and Scythian Eurasian Nomad storm
which had broken over South-West Asia at the turn of the eighth and
seventh centuries b.c. in waves of invasion that had flowed on as far
westward as Lydia and Palestine. The Iranian, like the Phoenician,
marchmen of the Achaemenian Empire appreciated the support that they
stood to gain from membership in this gigantic oecumenical polity
for the waging of their perpetual warfare against their traditional
enemies. 2 But, when Cyrus pushed on beyond ‘the Sown’ into ‘the
Desert’ to attack the formidable Central Asian Nomads on their own
ground, these Massagctae inflicted on him a disaster that cost him his
fife; and his third successor Darius was lucky to escape with his life
when, some seventeen years later, 1 he essayed the rather less hopeless
task of bringing to heel a Scythian Nomad adversary whose freedom of
manoeuvre was limited by the relatively narrow confines of the Scythians’
domain in the Steppe’s Great Western Bay. Cyrus’s first successor,
Cambyscs, brought a similar catastrophe on himself when he tried to
round off his facile conquest of an Asshur-haunted Egypt by invading
an unscathed Ethiopia; but the supreme Achaemenian miscalculation
was made by Darius and his successor Xerxes when they attempted to
conquer an Hellenic World which Cyrus had been content to contain
within what looked at first sight like ‘a natural frontier’. 4

Probably Cyrus had imagined that he was bequeathing to his succes¬
sors a definitive north-west frontier when he had completed his conquest
of the Lydian dominions by subjugating the Asiatic Greek communities
that had previously acknowledged Lydia’s suzerainty. Yet Apollo’s
warning to King Croesus of Lydia that, if he crossed the River Halys,
he would destroy a Great Power 5 might have been addressed to Croesus’s
conqueror Cyrus with no less prescience on a rather longer view; for, in
conquering the Lydian Empire, Cyrus was unwittingly bequeathing to
his successors an entanglement with the Hellenic World which was
eventually to be the death of the Achaemenian Empire.

• Sec II. ii. 140.

1 Sec II. ii. 138. In a year of insurrection (522-521 n.c.)in which most of the peoples
between the Caspian Gates and the Euphrates attempted to throw off a not very onerous
Achaemenian yoke, the Bactrian marchmen did not succumb to the temptation.

J Cyrus's campaign against the Massagetae is dated 530 b.c., and Darius’s campaign
against the Scyths 513 B.C., by A. T. Olmstead: History of the Persian Empire (Chicago
1948, University* of Chicago Press), pp. 87 and 147-8.

♦ The psychological limit to Achaemenian annexations that was set by the physical

limits of previous Assyrian and Eurasian Nomad ravages has been noticed in VI. vii.
684-5. * Herodotus, Book I, chap. 53.

432 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
The Achaemenids’ Assyrian predecessors, who had been so recklessly
aggressive in other quarters, 1 had refrained from trying to carry their
north-westward advance beyond the south-eastern fringe of the central
desert of Anatolia; and this was not only a genuine natural frontier; it
was also a cultural watershed dividing East Anatolian survivors of a
broken-down Hittitc Civilization over whom the Assyrians had extended
their rule 2 from West Anatolian backwoodsmen of an Hellenic World 1
which was still in the full vigour of its youth. This Central Anatolian
line of demarcation between two diverse worlds had, however, been
overrun during the death agonies of Assyria by barbarian Volker-
wandcrungcn in both directions. An eastward-travelling wave of
Phrygian barbarians from a no-man’s-land between the Assyrian
Empire and Lydia had surged up the Halys Valley into the upper basin
of the Euphrates to break against the Dcrsim 4 Highlands and wash
round their south-western foot-hills into the upper basin of the Tigris, 5
while a westward-travelling wave of Cimmerian and Scythian Nomad
invaders from the Eurasian Steppe had burst through the Caspian Gates

* See IV. iv. 476-80.

» While there seem* to be no doubt that the south-eastern edge of the Central Anato¬
lian Desert constituted the north-west frontier of the Assyrian Empire in the sector
between the Taurus and the Halys, there is some uncertainty about the extent of the
Assyrian dominions towards the north. According to E. Forrer: Die Provinzeinteilung
det Attyrischen Reiches (Leipzig 1920, Hinrichs), pp. 74 “nd 77. 'he principality of Kam-
manu—which appears to correspond to the Hellenic geographers' Southern Comana,
and not to their Chamanfn? (see VI. vii. 669, n. 6)—had belonged, before its annexa¬
tion by Sorgon in 712 B.C., to the Kasku, whom %ve may identify with the Gasga bar¬
barian denizens of the wooded mountains between the Anatolian Plateau and the Black
Sea coast who, in the second millennium B.C., had given such trouble to the Hittitcs even
at the height of their power. A prince of Kasku is recorded (sec Forrer, op. cit., p. 74)
to have paid tribute to Tiglath-Pileser III (regnabal 746-727 B.C.); and this indication
that Assyrian suzerainty- in Eastern Anatolia may have extended northwards towards
the mouth* of the Halys (Qyzyl Irmaq) and the Iris (Yeshil IrmSq) is supported by the
fact that the Cappadocians were called ‘Syrians’ by the Greeks who settled at Sinope,
Amisus, and other points along this coast in and after the eighth century B.c. (see, for
example, Herodotus, Book I, chaps. 72 and 76; Book III, chap. 90; Book V, chap. 49;
Book VII, chap. 72). The Greek name ‘Syria*, like the Persian name ‘Athurf’, originally
meant simply ‘the Assyrian Empire*. The Greeks called the inhabitants of the eastern
seaboard of the Mediterranean ‘Syrians’ because their country had once been under
Assyrian rule, and, on this analogy, the application of the name ‘White Syrians’ to the
inhabitants of the southern seaboard of the Black Sea would imply that Assyrian rule
had once extended to this coast likewise (see VI. vii. 581).

Whether Pontic Cappadocia as well as Inland Cappadocia was or was not included in
the Assyrian Empire, it is certain that the Hittite Civilization of Inland Cappadocia had
long since made itself at home in Pontic Cappadocia as well by the time when Augustus’s
contemporary, the Hellenic geographer Strabo of Amasia, wrote his description of a
country that was his homeland. This cultural reclamation of the once barbarian in¬
habitants of the Pontic Cappadocian country is likely to have taken place at a time when
the two Cappadocias were united politically under one sovereignty; and, if they were not
united in the eighth and seventh centuries b.c. as provinces or dependencies of the
Assyrian Empire, we may conjecture that the radiation of the Hittitc Civilization into
Pontus began under the Achacmcnian regime, after Inland Cappadocia had been de¬
tached from the autonomous principality of Cilicia (of which this Inland Cappadocia was
the original nucleus) and had been united with Pontic Cappadocia to form a single
Cappadocian viceroyalty (sec VI. vii. 674).

> The focus of the Hellenic Civilization was the basin of the Aegean Sea, and the
radiation of Hellenism grew progressively fainter at each successive farther remove from
the Aegean coast of the continent into the interior on both the Asiatic and the European
side. An eighth-century traveller from Phocaca or Smyrna up the valley of the Hcrmus
would have found the light dwindling in Lydia and fading out in Phrygia, as a contem¬
porary traveller from Olynthus or Meth6nS up the valley of the Axius would have found
it gradually diminishing as he passed through Macedonia and Paconia into Dardania.

* Graeci Derxinfi or Xerx§n« (sec VI. vii. 666). » See VI. vii. 604-3.

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM

433

and broken into Anatolia from Azerbaijan by travelling up the Araxes
and down the Halys. 1

This double deluge of Barbarism had obliterated the old Anatolian
landmarks, and the two Powers, Lydia and Media, which had then
risen to greatness by sharing the honour of bringing the turbulent flood
waters under control, had fallen into conflict with one another over the
division between them of Anatolian territories that they had delivered
from a barbarian domination. An inconclusive contest had ended in
585 b.c. in a partition of the peninsula along the line of the Lower
Halys; 2 and, after Croesus had been tempted by the news of Media’s
fall to upset this Medo-Lydian settlement by crossing the Halys in order
to lay hands on formerly Median territory in North-Eastern Anatolia,
which Cyrus regarded as being his own lawful property by right of his
claim to be his deposed grandfather King Cyaxares of Media’s legitimate
successor, the Persian empire-builder sought to solve an Anatolian
frontier problem which he had inherited from his Median predecessors
by a wholesale annexation of the Lydian Empire and its dependencies
that carried the north-west frontier of the Achaemcnian Empire forward
from the cast bank of the River Halys to the eastern shores of the Black
Sea Straits and the Aegean Sea.

If, in making this sweeping westward advance, Cyrus imagined that
he was replacing an artificial frontier by a natural one, he was acting
under a misapprehension which was mercilessly exposed by the sequel;
for the salt sea—which had once poured in to isolate an ‘Asia’ from a
‘Europe’ when the God Poseidon’s dramatic trident-stroke had cleft an
originally unbroken continent in twain from the mouths of the Aegean
Sea to the head of the Sea of Azov—had, by Cyrus’s day, long since
ceased to be ‘estranging’. 3 An element whose challenging inroad had
stimulated primitive pioneers in the art of seamanship to become the
creators of the Minoan Civilization 4 had lost its primeval terrors for
post-Minoan Hellenic mariners who had ventured out of a land-locked
Aegean into the Mediterranean and on out of the Mediterranean into
the Atlantic. For the Hellenes of the sixth century b.c., the once estrang¬
ing Aegean had become a ‘tunny pond’ linking, instead of sundering, the
‘Asiatic’ and ‘European’ halves of Hellas as, in the twentieth century
of the Christian Era, the ‘European’ and ‘American’ halves of a Modern
Western World were linked together by a ‘herring pond’ which had
once been an impassable gulf. And even the island-studded Aegean, with
its chain of submerged mountains lifting their peaks above sea-level to
offer a timid wayfarer alternative rows of stepping stones, was not so
easy for landsmen to cross as the river-like straits at the Bosphorus and at
the Dardanelles.

Cyrus’s third successor Darius had no sooner completed his re-

« See VI. vii. 606-10 and 675-6'

J The river line which thus served as a political frontier from 585 «o 547 BC : wa)
play the tame role again some eighteen or nineteen centuries later when, (tom circa A.D.
x 243 to circa a.d. 1335, it formed the frontier between the Mongol Il-Khans of Iran and
'Iraq and their vassals the Saljuq Sultans of Rum and these Saljflqs' local successors.

J Sec the lines from Matthew Arnold’s poem Iiolation, quoted in II. i. 3 * 6 .

♦ Sec the lines from Horace’s Odes, Book I, Ode 3, quoted in II. i. 327.

434 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
organization of the Achaemenian Empire after the Year of Insurrection
than he took the short step from the Continental Asiatic Greek headland
of Mycalc on to the adjacent island of Samos; 1 and, after that, he threw
a bridge of boats across the Bosphorus, as easily as across the Danube,
in laying his line of communications for his campaign against the Scyths
in 513 b.c. The ill-success of this excursion into the Great Western Bay
of the Eurasian Steppe did not deter Darius from enlarging his foothold
on the European side of the Straits next year, when he extended his
suzerainty westward as far as Mount Olympus. In the same year 512
B.c. his viceroy in Egypt encroached on the Hellenic World from another
quarter by annexing Cyrenaica. In 510-505 b.c. 2 Achaemenian diplomacy
made an attempt to cast its imperial net over Athens, and in 500 B.c. the
emperor’s viceroy in Lydia made an abortive expedition against the
Aegean island of Naxos. It might almost have seemed as if Darius were
annexing the Hellenic World in a fit of absentmindedness if there had
not been a hint of something more like a grand design in his dispatch of a
reconnoitring expedition as far afield as Magna Graecia 3 even before his
occupation of Samos, and in the interest that he showed (if Herodotus
is to be believed) 4 in a scheme for the occupation of Sardinia that was
dangled before him by the Milesian adventurer Histiaeus. However
that may be, Darius made no secret of his resolve to extinguish what
remained of Hellenic independence after the year 499 b.c., when the
dispatch of a naval expeditionary force by a still independent Athens and
a still independent Eretria had given the signal for an insurrection of the
Achaemenian Empire’s Hellenic subjects which spread from the west
coast of Anatolia to the Bosphorus in one direction and to Cyprus in
the other.*

Though the immediate occasion of this formidable outbreak had been
a personal quarrel between the Persian and the Greek commander of the
abortive naval expedition against Naxos in the preceding year, the under¬
lying cause was the irksomeness of even the easy-going Achaemenian
regime to an Asiatic maritime people who, unlike the Ionians’ unsuccess¬
ful Syrophocnician competitors for the economic dominion of the
Mediterranean, had never had their spirit broken on the chariot-wheel
of Assyrian militarism. Sober reason should have reminded Darius that,
though the Continental Asiatic Hellenes had not been crushed by the
Assyrians, they had at any rate been partially broken in to political
servitude by their previous experience of a Lydian suzerainty which had
never been imposed on their European kinsmen, and that in his own
day these rebellious Ionian subjects of his were the least warlike of all
contemporary Hellenes. If a subject Ionia had nevertheless proved to

» See Herodotus, Book III, chap. 139.

1 See Olmstead, op. cit., pp. 151-2.

» Sec the story of Darius’s Crotoniate Greek physician DcmocMfs in Herodotus,
Book III, chaps. 129-38.

* See Herodotus, Book V, chap. 106, and Book VI, chap. 2.

5 The revolt was not confined to Asiatic Hellenes whose mother tongue happened to
be Greek. The non-Greek-speaking Carian insurgents gave the Persians more trouble
than all their Greek-speaking comrades-in-arms (Herodotus, Book V, chaps. 117-21).
On the other hand the Cypriots, whose mother tongue was Greek but who were not yet
more than semi-Hellenic in their culture, were reconquered by the Persians with com¬
parative case (Herodotus, Book V, chaps. 108-16).

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 4 35

be a hornet’s nest, an Achaemenian empire-builder could not reasonably
expect to make an easy conquest of other Hellenic peoples who had
never yet lost their independence; but Reason was eclipsed by Anger in
the soul of an emperor who had taken the provocation offered him in
499 b . c . as an unpardonable defiance of his pretensions to world-
dominion; the eclipse of Reason left the blinded autocrat at the mercy of
Hybris; and Hybris betrayed him into the fatal decision to resort to his
predecessor Cyrus’s dubious policy of cutting his way out of an exasperat¬
ing geographical entanglement.

Cyrus had got rid of an unsatisfactory river-frontier with Lydia by
extending his dominion over the domain of the Lydian Empire; Darius
would get rid of an unsatisfactory sea-frontier with an independent
remnant of Hellas by bringing the whole of Hellas, in her turn, under
his oecumenical sovereignty. After the last embers of Hellenic revolt in
Asia had been stamped out in 493 b.c., Darius immediately started
operations against Hcllas-in-Europe. The year 492 B.c. saw Mardonius’s
abortive expedition against Continental European Greece along the
north shore of the Aegean; the year 490 B.c. saw Datis’ and Artaphernes’
likewise abortive expedition across the Aegean to Marathon. Thereafter
Darius’s energies were diverted, for the rest of his life, to the task of
suppressing a revolt in Egypt; but the reverses of 492 and 490 B.c. did
not move him to reconsider his designs against Hellas; he bequeathed
them, unabated, to his successor Xerxes; and Xerxes’ dutiful execution
of his father’s political testament led him into the historic disasters of
480-479 b.c. at Salamis, Plataea, and MycalS.

The Aftermath on the Political Plane

In retorting to the revolt of his Hellenic subjects in Asia by resolving
to conquer their kinsmen and accomplices in Europe, Darius had con¬
verted a seven-years-long insurrection (flagrabat 499-493 b.c.) into a
fifty-onc-years-long war [gerebatur 499-449 b.c.) ; for the trial of strength
with a still independent Hellas to which Darius had committed the
Achaemenian Empire did not end with the failure in 479 b.c. of Xerxes’
invasion of Europe. Before peace could be restored the Achaemenidae
had to reconcile themselves to the loss of the western seaboard of
Anatolia from Lycia to the Bosphorus inclusive, in addition to the loss of
their Transhellespontinc outposts in Europe, while the Athenians had
to recognize their inability permanently to detach Pamphylia, Cyprus,
and Egypt as well from the Achaemenian Empire. These disillusioning
experiences on both sides did at last beget a peace settlement which was
as statesmanlike in its objective of re-establishing peace on terms that
would not prove intolerable for either party as it was ingenious in
translating this enlightened aim into practical provisions for bilateral
demilitarization; 1 and for a few years after the negotiation of the

« A masterly elucidation of the terms of the Athcno-Achaemenian peace settlement of
450/449 B.C. by H. T. Wade-Gen’ will be found in Harvard Studies in Classical Philo¬
logy, special volume: 'Athenian Studies Presented to William Scott Ferguson’ (Cam¬
bridge, Mass. 1940, Harvard University Press), pp. 121-56. A cynic might point out
that the high contracting parties came to terms with one another at the expense of the
Asiatic Hellenes whose aspirations to political independence had been the original cause

436 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

Atheno-Achaemenian treaty of 450/449 B.c. it looked as if this act of
statesmanship might have succeeded in restoring a general equilibrium
between the Syriac and Hellenic worlds that had been momentarily
attained towards the close of the sixth century b.c., after the Carthagin¬
ians had finished rounding off their empire and before Darius had
begun to extend the bounds of his.

The destruction of this sixth-century equilibrium in the Aegean and
the Levant through the outbreak of the Hcllcno-Persian War of 499-449
b.c. had been followed by corresponding upheavals in the Western
Mediterranean. A Carthaginian attack on the Hellenes in Sicily which
had been delivered in the year of Xerxes’ attack on Continental European
Greece 1 had ended there in an even greater catastrophe for the aggressor;
and Hiero’s victory over the Carthaginians had set his hands free to
inflict an equally signal defeat on the Etruscans when, six years later,
these allies of Carthage belatedly delivered a fresh attack on the Cam¬
panian outpost of the Hellenic World at Cumae. 2 Thus in the Western
Mediterranean peace had been restored a quarter of a century before its
restoration in the Levant in 449 B.c. But an equilibrium that had even¬
tually been re-established in all quarters was upset once again before the
fifth century had run its course, and this time the disturbing factor was
not any fresh Persian or Carthaginian act of aggression against Hellas,
but the outbreak in 431 b.c. of a fratricidal war between Hellene and
Hellene which spelled the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization. 1

This warfare within the bosom of the Hellenic Society, which dragged
on from 431 B.c. until a settlement was dictated in 338 b.c. to the city-
states of Continental European Hellas by King Philip of Macedon, upset
the equilibrium between the Hellenic World and its neighbours in
divers ways.

In the first place it presented both the Carthaginians and the Achae-
menidae with an irresistible temptation to take advantage of their
Hellenic rivals’ apparently suicidal mania. After the crippling of the
power of Athens through the disaster that overtook the Athenian expedi¬
tionary force in Sicily in 413 B.C., the Carthaginians broke a seventy-
ycars-long truce with their independent Hellenic neighbours by trying
their hand in 409-406 B.c. at a conquest of the whole of Sicily, including
Syracuse, which the Athenians had just failed to achieve, while the
Achaemenidae began to take cautious steps for the recovery of the
Asiatic Greek territories which they had lost in 479 B.c. and had been
compelled to renounce thirty years later. In this new counter-offensive
the Carthaginians were less successful than the Persians. In Sicily after
the Carthaginian breach of the peace in 409 B.c. the struggle swayed to

of the war. So far from leaving the Asiatic Hellenes independent, the treaty of 450/449 b.c.
appears to have left them defenceless against their former masters the Achaemenidae as
well as against their present masters the Athenians by providing for the dismantling of
their fortifications.

1 The scanty surviving evidence leaves it an open question whether these two simul¬
taneous attacks on the Hellenic World in 480 B.c. were concerted, or whether their
simultaneity was fortuitous.

1 For the previous attack in 524 B.C., see p. 429, above.

5 There was a relation of historical effect and cause between the breakdown of the
Hellenic Civilization in 431 b.c. and the successful repulse of Xerxes’ attack on Hellas
in 480-479 B.c. (sec pp. 522-5, below).

ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 437

and fro for 168 years, during which the Carthaginians always just failed
to take Syracuse and the Hellenes to take Lilybaeum, till the Carthagin¬
ian wooden curtain across the south-western quarter of the Mediter¬
ranean was battered in by Roman rams in the first Romano-Punic War
(gerebatur 263-241 b . c .). In the Aegean and the Levant, on the other
hand, the Achacmenian Imperial Government had the satisfaction in
386 b . c . of dictating to the warring states of Continental European
Greece ‘the Emperor’s Peace’ in a communique announcing that His
Imperial Majesty Artaxerxcs II was vindicating the historic rights of his
house by resuming possession of all Hellenic territories on the Asiatic
mainland, together with the islands of Clazomenae and Cyprus.

At that moment the Achacmenian Empire might have been thought
to have achieved by diplomacy all that Darius the Great had dreamed of
achieving by force, for the communique went on to decree that all other
Hellenic communities except the ancient Athenian possessions of
Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros were to have their independence restored
to them by the fiat of the Imperial Court at Susa. Appearances, however,
were deceptive; for another effect of the long-drawn-out fratricidal war¬
fare in Hellas was to make the Hellenes past masters in the art of war at
the cost of ruining everything that had once made Hellenic life worth
living; and the Achacmenian and Carthaginian empires were swept
away as soon as the new Hellenic weapons forged at this prohibitive
price were turned by Macedonian and Roman war-lords against the
Hellenic World’s hereditary enemies. 1

The Aftermath on the Cultural Plane

Thus the military and political aggression of the Hellenic Society
against its neighbours, which the victims of it had succeeded in arresting
in the sixth century b.c., was resumed in and after the fourth century
b . c . in a wider arena which has already been surveyed in an earlier
chapter; 2 but there was also a cultural plane of action on which enduring
pacific conquests were made by the Hellenic Civilization before, as well
as after, the generation of Alexander the Great.

The natives of Sicily, who did their utmost to resist by force of arms
the interloping Greek colonists’ aggressive attempts to evict or subjugate
them, were at the same time voluntarily adopting the language, religion,
and art of their Greek assailants. 3 The never conquered Elymi, as well
as the Sican subjects of Akragas and Sicel subjects of Syracuse, took to
speaking Greek, calling their hereditary divinities by Hellenic names,
and honouring them by building them temples in the Hellenic style
of architecture. A notable Sicel convert to the Hellenic culture was
Ducetius, the defeated patriot leader in the Sicels’ last stand against
Syracusan imperialism. 4 Even in the 'barred zone’ behind a Carthaginian
‘wooden curtain’, where no Hellenic ships might sail nor Hellenic
merchants set foot on land to do business direct with the Carthaginians’
African and Iberian native subjects, the militant Carthaginian middle-

* See III. iii. 150, and p.409, above. 1 On pp. 403-18, above.

» See, for example, Dunbabin, op. tit., pp. 177, 191-3. ar * d 334 ~S-

* See V. vi. 235-6, and p. 587, below.

438 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
man, who exploited a monopoly won through force of arms by pocketing
as large a share of the commercial profits as the trade would bear, found
himself constrained to eke out his own Punic poverty of creative power
and artistic sensibility by importing the attractive manufactures of the
independent Hellenic communities in Sicily to supply the economic
demand of the Carthaginian Empire and its vast commercial hinterland;
and, however successful the Libyphoenician might be as a business man
in fleecing both the natives and the Hellenes between whom he had
forcibly interposed himself, it was beyond his power—and no doubt
equally beyond the range of his imagination—to think of preventing the
native peoples under his control from being influenced by the artistry
of Hellenic wares which the Punic importer was compelled to peddle
because his own industries were incapable of emulating them.

An Hellenic culture, whose radiation thus triumphantly succeeded in
penetrating 'the wooden curtain’ that screened the Carthaginian Empire,
made relatively easy conquests in a contemporary Achacmenian Empire
where the regime was much less restrictive and the population much
more cultivated. The Hcllenization of Lydia, which had been given an
impetus by the incorporation of the Continental Asiatic Hellenes into
the Lydian Empire in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., had gone so
far by 401 b.c.— sixty-seven years before Alexander’s crossing of the
Dardanelles—that in that year a Lydian, who, by assuming a Boeotian
accent, had successfully passed himself off as a Hellene in order to enlist
in an expeditionary force of Hellenic soldiers of fortune, was able to
sustain his part so well that he might have remained undetected by his
comrades-in-arms if his pierced ears had not eventually betrayed him to
Hellenic eyes sharpened by danger;’ and between the turn of the century
and 334 B - c - l hc Syrophoenicians capitulated on the cultural plane to the
Hellenic style of art, though the persistence on the economic and political
planes of their hostility to their hereditary enemy was to be demon¬
strated in 332 B.c. by the desperate military resistance which Alexander
was to encounter at Tyre. But a pre-Alexandrine Hellenism’s most fruit¬
ful cultural conquests were not made in either of the two great Syriac
empires whose establishment in the sixth century- b.c. had arrested
the Hellenic World’s military, political, and commercial expansion. The
historic event in the propagation of Hellenism in this age was the
Hellcnization of the Etruscans and other originally non-Hellenic peoples
on the western seaboard of Italy.

The Etruscans had no sooner settled in Italy than they began to be
appreciably affected by the culture of an Hellenic World which lay
between this transmarine Etruria and an Anatolian homeland with which
the colonial Etruscans must soon have lost touch—to judge by the
absence of any convincing indication of their place of origin in those
echoes of a colonial Etruscan tradition which the historian’s ear could
catch in the surviving works of Hellenic antiquarians. After the mili¬
tary struggle between Etruscans and Hellenes for the command of

1 .See Xenophon, Expedilio Cyri, Book III, chap, i, §| 26-32. Already in 480 b.c. the
equipment of the Lydian contingent in Xerxes’ expeditionary force had been almost
identical with the Hellenic equipment of the day (Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 74).

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SYRIAC WORLD 439

the Tyrrhene Sea had ended on a basis of uti possidetis as a result of
the Etruscans’ naval defeat off Cumae in 474 b.c., the reception of the
Hellenic culture in Etruria was so catholic and so rapid that the Etruscans
had become Hellenes by adoption before they fell under the rule of
Roman empire-builders who acquired much of their own Hellenism at
second hand from their Etruscan neighbours and eventual subjects. 1

The Hcllcnization of Rome—in the first instance perhaps mainly
through Etruscan intermediaries and latterly also through a direct inter¬
course, of ever increasing intimacy, between Romans and Greeks—was,
of course, the most important cultural conquest that the Hellenes ever
achieved at any stage of their history either before or after the generation
of Alexander; for the Romans, whatever their origin, 2 took up a task
which had proved to be beyond the power of the Etruscan settlers on
the West Italian coast to the north of them and the Greek settlers on the
West Italian coast to the south of them and the Massilian pioneers of
Hellenism at the mouth of the Rhone. After the Italiot Greeks had
succumbed to an Oscan and the Etruscans to a Celtic barbarian counter¬
offensive, the Romans carried a Latinized Hellenism into the Abruzzi
and over the Appennines and the Po and the Alps till they had planted
it right across the Continental European hinterland of the Mediter¬
ranean, from the delta of the Danube to the mouths of the Rhine and,
across the Straits of Dover, in Britain. 2

3. Encounters with the Syriac Civilization 4

In the sinister history of Assyrian militarism the principal episode, as
we have already observed, was a domestic conflict between the Assyrian
march and the Babylonian interior of a Babylonic World; for this fra¬
tricidal struggle ruined the Babylonic Society before ending in a Pyrrhic
victory for a short-lived Neo-Babylonian Empire. 5 We have also ob¬
served, however, that this disastrous militarism had been generated by
the grim ordeal of a life-and-dcath struggle which had been forced upon
Assyria in the eleventh and tenth centuries b.c. by aggressive Aramaean
pioneers of a nascent Syriac Civilization 6 whose north-eastward expan¬
sion was a belated backwash from a Volkerwanderung precipitated by

1 The acceleration in the process of the Hellenization of Etruria between the sixth
and the fourth century B.c. is graphically recorded in the wall-paintings in Etruscan
tombs at Caere (Cervetri). On the other hand, in their depiction of the torments in¬
flicted on the damned in Hell, the Etruscan painters betray an un-Hellenic vein of sadism
in the Etruscan £thos which was incidentally communicated to the Roman pupils in an
Etruscan school of Hellenism, and which reappears even in a latter-day Tuscan Dante’s
Ditina Commedia. The origin of this sinister streak in the Etruscan tradition is a mystery.
It makes the impression of being of non-Hellenic provenance (though the torments of
the damned do figure in Hellenic art and legend); and it is a matter of recorded history
that the institution of gladiatorial shows, which was perhaps the most atrocious of all
the cruel practices that the Romans learnt from Etruscan instructors, was so abhorrent
to Greek feelings that it never gained any foothold in Greek communities under Roman
rule. The inference is that this Etruscan sadism was an element in the Etruscans’
Anatolian heritage which was too near to the heart of their tradition for the counter¬
influence of Hellenism to be able to eliminate it. Yet, if the origin of Etruscan sadism
may be Anatolian, it can hardly be Hittite; for, to judge by the surviving corpus of Hit-
titc legislation, the Hittite Civilization was as humane as the Hellenic.

1 See pp. 702-5, below. J Sec II. ii. 160-4 and V. v. 213-15.

* See xi, maps 17. >8, 19, 20, 2t, 31.

J See II. ii. 135-7 »nd IV. iv. 476-84. 6 See II. ii. 134-5.

440 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the collapse of ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt in South-West Asia and the
overthrow of ‘the thalassocracy of Minos’ in the Aegean. Thus a collision
with an alien society had been the occasion of an Assyrian transgression
that was eventually fatal to the society of which the Assyrians themselves
were members. The Syriac Civilization was not the only alien society
that was to cross the path of the Assyrians before these rabid Babylonic
militarists had bled themselves to death. The Assyrians also bore down
upon the remnants of an already broken Hittite Society astride the
Taurus, and upon an Egyptiac Society that had continued to survive
in the Nile Valley in a petrified state after repelling ‘the Sea Peoples’
from the coasts of the Delta at the turn of the thirteenth and twelfth
centuries b.c. But, in the history of these three encounters with a Baby-
Ionic Civilization represented first by Assyria and, after Assyria’s self-
annihilation, by Babylonia, the reactions of the Babylonic World’s
Syriac neighbours were of outstanding historical importance; and the
outcome of this interplay between the Syriac and the Babylonic Civiliza¬
tion is an impressive illustration of the truth that 'the meek shall inherit
the Earth’. 1

In a drama which opened in the tenth century b.c. with an Aramaean
military offensive against Assyria, the close of this first act left the
Aramaeans prostrate and the Assyrians triumphant. In the course of
the ninth century b.c. the territories in Mesopotamia and the Upper
Tigris Basin that had previously been overrun by Aramaean tribes were
conquered by the Assyrians and converted into provinces of an Assyrian
Empire. But the very thoroughness with which the subjugated Aramaeans
were incorporated into an Assyrian body politic gave them an opening
in the second act of the play for a peaceful penetration of the Babylonic
body social which these foiled aggressors had never achieved so long as
they had been on the war-path; and in this second act the Aramaeans’
cultural conquest of their military conquerors proceeded pari passu
with the extension of the Assyrians’ domination over the Syriac World.

Between the accession of Tiglath-Pileser III in 746 b.c. and the
annihilation of the last Assyrian army at HarrSn in 610-609 b.c. an
expanding Assyrian Power followed up its victory over the Aramaean
peoples east of the Middle Euphrates by extending its operations to the
west bank of the river and subduing all the Aramaean, Phoenician, and
Hebrew communities in the homeland of the Syriac Civilization except
the single Philistine city-state of Gaza and a still precariously independent
Hebrew principality of Judah. 1 The Assyrian empire-builders sought to
make their hold on their new conquests permanent by forcibly redistri¬
buting the conquered populations; 3 and, although in the event this
inhuman Assyrian practice failed to achieve its perpetrators’ political
purpose, it made its mark on History by assisting the Assyrians’ victims

1 Matt. v. 5.

2 When a Judah that had just escaped falling into Assyrian hands in 700 b.c. was
carried away captive in 597 and 586 B.C. by the Assyrians' Babylonian heirs, the only
provinces of the Syriac World that still remained unscathed by Babylonic militarism
were the Phoenicians’ colonial domain in the Western basin of the Mediterranean, which
was insulated by the Sea, and Arabia Felix (the Yaman), which was insulated by Arabian
deserts (the Najd and the Hijaz).

2 Sec VI. vii. 111-12 and 114-17.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SYRIAC WORLD 441
to win a cultural victory which the Assyrian aggressors had not foreseen
and which the broken Syriac peoples had not sought.

The ‘displaced persons’ whom the Assyrians deported from a con¬
quered Syria to their dominions east of Euphrates reinforced the
previously conquered Aramaean representatives of the Syriac Civili¬
zation in Mesopotamia; this reinforcement gave an impetus to the
pacific cultural encroachments which the Mesopotamian Aramaeans had
already been beginning to make upon the Babylonic Civilization’s domain;
and, before Assyria’s fall, a thus potently intensified eastward-streaming
radiation of the Syriac culture had produced signal effects that were
never to be undone. By the end of the seventh century b.c. the Syriac
culture had not only made a lodgement within the Babylonic body
social; its influence had penetrated beyond the Babylonic World’s
easternmost outposts into a no-man’s-land tenanted by Iranian bar¬
barians, to compete there with the influence of the Babylonic culture
itself for the conversion of these receptive barbarians’ souls; and in the
sixth century b . c . a third act of the play was opened by a dramatic
reversal, through Iranian intervention, of the relations in which the
Syriac and Babylonic societies had stood to one another since the ninth
century, when the Assyrians had established their military and political
ascendancy over the Aramaeans. The liquidation of the Neo-Babylonian
Empire by the Achaemenid empire-builder Cyrus in 539-538 b . c . did
not merely liberate the Jews and the Syrophoenicians from a Babylonian
yoke; it actually raised them, as we have seen , 1 to the status of privileged
partners of the new Persian masters of South-Western Asia; and this
change in the Syriac peoples' political fortunes had latent cultural
corollaries which revealed themselves in the sequel.

Achaemenids who, on the political plane, had sought to insure their
rdgime against any risk of a revival of the liquidated Neo-Babylonian
Empire by pursuing an anti-Babylonian policy of putting down the
mighty from their seat and exalting the humble and meek 2 had at the
same time started their imperial career on the cultural plane as still
unquestioning proselytes of the Babylonic Civilization. The imperial
archives at the newly created imperial residence Perscpolis in Pcrsis, as
well as those at the ancient capital city Susa in Elam, were recorded,
more Babylonico, on clay tablets in cuneiform characters in the Elamite
language; and the same Babylonic script was employed in the trilingual
inscriptions on imperial monuments—such as Darius I’s record, on the
rock at Bchistan, of his acts in the Year of Insurrection—for the con¬
veyance of all three imperial languages—Elamite for Susa, Akkadian
for Babylon, and Medo-Pcrsian for Ecbatana and Persepolis—in which
these Achaemenian imperial inscriptions were presented. To convey
the Iranian imperial people’s previously unwritten Medo-Pcrsian mother
tongue, a special version of the cuneiform script was expressly devised . 3

These early Achaemenian measures in the domain of language and
writing signified a Persian reception of the Babylonic culture which the
Persian heirs of the Neo-Babylonian Empire doubtless took as a matter
of course; but the rival Syriac culture revealed its competitive power of

* On pp. 425-6, above. » Luke i. 52. * See V. v. 123, n. 2, and VI. %-ii. 247.

442 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
counter-attraction in the no less significant Achaemenian act of state by
which the Aramaic language and alphabet were given official currency
in all Achaemenian territories west of the Euphrates, 1 including Egypt
and Anatolia, where Aramaic was not indigenous even as a vernacular, as
well as Syria, where Aramaic was already replacing a Canaanitc language
that had been the vernacular of Phoenicia and Judaea; and this propaga¬
tion of the Aramaic language and alphabet through Persian agency
among the Persians’ non-Aramaean subjects in the West was the prelude
to a reception of the Syriac culture in an Aramaic medium by the
Persians themselves. An Iranian people that had entered on its imperial
career in the sixth century b.c. under the spell of the Babylonic culture
had already transferred its cultural allegiance from the Babylonic to the
Syriac Civilization before the Achaemenian Empire was overthrown by
Alexander. The faultiness of the later Achaemenian inscriptions in
Persian cuneiform suggests that the version of a Babylonic script which
the Persians had invented for their own use had never gained popular
currency; 1 and in the post-Achaemenian Age the Iranians were writing
their Middle Persian mother tongue in the Aramaic Alphabet and were
even using Aramaic words written in the Aramaic Alphabet as ideo¬
grams to stand for their Iranian synonyms. 3

The post-Achaemenian Age that thus saw the Syriac Society consum¬
mate its captivation of once barbarian Iranians who had taken their first
lesson in civilization from Babylonic instructors was an age of Hellenic
military and political ascendancy in South-West Asia and Egypt; and
the same age also saw the same Syriac Society achieve the still greater
triumphs of defeating the Hellenic Society in a competition for the
cultural conversion of the Babylonic and Egyptiac worlds, and dividing
the honours with its Hellenic rival in a contemporary struggle for win¬
ning the cultural allegiance of the debris of a broken Hittitc Society
astride the Taurus. It was assuredly no accident that the Syriac Society’s
most substantial successes in the peaceful penetration of neighbouring
worlds should have been gained after the fall of an Achaemenian Power
which had patronized the Syriac culture because it had been the political
patron of the Syriac peoples. The antagonism which the Achaemenian
rdgime had evoked in Babylonic and Egyptiac souls had checked the
spontaneous reception of the Syriac culture in these two worlds more
effectively than the Achaemenian Government’s official patronage could
ever promote it; and, when this compromising political association was
brought to an end by the liquidation of the Achaemenian Empire, the
Syriac Civilization found its opportunities for cultural conquest en¬
hanced under an Hellenic political regime which did not show its Syriac
subjects any embarrassing favours.

The victory of the Syriac over the Hellenic culture in Babylonia under
a post-Achaemenian Hellenic regime was notable because, of all the
Achaemcnids’ former subjects, the Babylonians were the most readily
inclined to welcome their new Hellenic rulers as deliverers from an
odious Achaemenian yoke. 4 Yet, under a philobabylonian Selcucid

' See V. v. 123, n. 2, and 499, and VI. vii. 248-9. 1 Sec V. v. 123, n. 2.

> See I. i. 80 and 81, n. 3. 4 See V. v. 94 and 347.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SYRIAC WORLD 443
regime, a handful of Babylonian scholars and astronomers who frater¬
nized with their Greek confreres in a joint pursuit of esoteric common
intellectual interests weighed as dust in the balance against the tens
and hundreds of thousands of their compatriots who were taking to
speaking Aramaic instead of Akkadian and writing, if literate, in the
Alphabet instead of in cuneiform. This eviction of the native Babylonic
script and language by more convenient Aramaic substitutes for them
was a process which had begun in the Babylonic World in the days of the
Assyrian Empire; 1 and it was completed by the simultaneous extinction
of cuneiform and Akkadian in the first century- of the Christian Era,
under the rule of the Seleucids’ barbarian Arsacid successors. 2

In Assyria and Babylonia, as in Palestine and Phoenicia, the spread of
the Aramaic tongue—which in the Babylonic World was a carrier of
the Syriac culture—was facilitated by a kinship between the intrusive
language and the sister Semitic native language that it was replacing;
and in Babylonia the invading Syriac culture enjoyed, after its recep¬
tion in Iran, the further advantage of encircling its victim. In Egypt,
on the other hand, an invading Syriac culture whose homeland was
still nearer to Egypt than it was to Babylonia, and whose competi¬
tion with Hellenism for the cultural conquest of Egypt was not handi¬
capped by any Egyptian counterpart of a Babylonic philhellenism, was
at the same time at a relative disadvantage in being unable to overwhelm
its victim by an encircling movement and unable to coax him into
conversion by offering him, as the vehicle of the new culture that he was
being invited to adopt, a language that had a manifest affinity with his
own. On this linguistic ground the Syriac culture’s Hellenic competitor
was, of course, at an equal disadvantage in Egypt; but, when we proceed
with our comparison of the two rival missionary cultures’ respective
strengths and weaknesses in Egypt as contrasted with Babylonia, we
perceive that an Egypt that was not appreciably closer than Babylonia
was to Syria and Mesopotamia was within far shorter range and easier
reach than Babylonia was of the homeland of Hellenism in the Aegean
Basin; and we also observe that Hellenism was in a position to employ
against Egypt the manoeuvre of encirclement that was being employed
by the Syriac culture against Babylonia, since Egypt was exposed to a
convergent radiation of Hellenic influence from the rapidly Hellenized
city-states of Philistia on the east as well as from the colonial Greek city-
states of Cyrenaica on her western flank.

The militant Egyptiac reaction against Hellenic rule which declared
itself at the turn of the third and second centuries B.c. retarded the
Hcllcnization of Egypt without benefiting Hellenism’s Syriac rival,
since the xenophobia that had come to be the dominant vein in the
Egyptiac ethos by that date was too rabid to draw nice distinctions
between the peculiar horrors of Phoenician, Jewish, and Greek pariahs;
and, when in the third century of the Christian Era the native body
social of an Egypt under Roman rule had been superficially assimilated
to a genuinely Greek Alexandria and Ptolemais by being given a veneer

I See I. i. 79.

1 See p. 125, n. 3. correcting I. i. 79-80 and II.

444 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
of what purported to be Hellenic municipal institutions, 1 it might have
seemed as if, whatever the ultimate destinies of Hellenism in Egypt
might be, Hellenism’s Syriac competitor, at any rate, was now here out
of the running. Nor were these prospects materially changed by the
contemporary conversion of Egypt to Christianity; for the oecumenical
Catholicism that was the original form in which an Helleno-Syriac
higher religion was received in Egypt was conveyed in the media of the
Greek language and Hellenic philosophy. The victory in Egypt which
was eventually gained over Hellenism after all by a Syriac Civilization
whose prospects had long since apparently dwindled to vanishing-point
was the consequence of a common movement in the Egyptiac and Syriac
worlds to declare their independence of Hellenism in the arena of Chris¬
tian theological controversy by seceding from a Hellenizing Catholic
Church to a Monophysitism which could be made the symbol and instru¬
ment of an anti-Hellenic reversion to the traditions of a native culture.

This movement started in Egypt when the stubbornly un-Hcllcnizcd
and covertly anti-Hellenic rural mass of the Egyptian people ran away
with a Monophysitism that had first been conceived in the polemical
minds of Alexandrian Greek clerics as an incident in a theological war¬
fare between Alexandria and Constantinople which was a reflection of
the rivalry between these two competing focuses of a Christian Hellenic
culture. Before the close of the fifth century of the Christian Era the
native Egyptians had converted this family quarrel within the bosom
of the Hellenic World into a new expression of the Egyptiac World’s
scven-hundred-years-old quarrel with a domineering Hellenism. But in
the fifth century of the Christian Era, as in the seventh century b.c., a
petrified Egyptiac Society lacked the strength to evict an alien oppressor
without the support of an alien ally; and this indispensable alien aid,
which the Salte Pharaohs had obtained by enlisting the military services
of Ionian and Carian ‘Brazen men from the Sea', was found by the fifth-
ccntury Egyptian fathers of a Coptic Monophysite Church in an ecclesi¬
astical alliance with Syriac fellow Monophysites in the Asiatic dominions
of the Roman Empire south-east of the Amanus Range.

This fraternization between a submerged Syriac and a submerged
Egyptiac Society on the religious basis of a common Monophysitism
confronted a moribund Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ with a mass-opposition in
its Oriental dominions which it failed either to repress or to appease;
and the sixth-century Syrian champion of Monophysitism, Ya'qub bar
Addai, had virtually undone the Hellenizing work of Alexander the
Great and his Macedonian and Roman successors before the seventh-
century Muslim Arab barbarian invaders gave the Roman imperial
regime in Syria and Egypt its coup de grdee . In thus shaking itself free
at last from a long endured Hellenic yoke the Egyptiac Society was not,
however, recovering its ancient cultural independence; it was escaping
from a superficial Hellenization at the price of allowing itself to be
absorbed into the body social of a Syriac Civilization that was no less
alien to it than the Hellenic; and the Egyptiac World did not elude its
fate by eschewing the reception of the latter-day Syriac versions of an

1 See VI. vii. 50, and p. 408, above, and p. 586, below.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SYRIAC WORLD 4 45
Aramaic language and alphabet that had been the Syriac Society’s instru¬
ments for picking Babylonic locks. The Egyptians used their own living
vernacular language as their literary vehicle for a Monophysite Christian
liturgy and theology, and they took the Greek and not the Syriac Alpha¬
bet as the basis for the new script that they invented to convey their new
Coptic ecclesiastical language; but the Syriac Civilization needed no
linguistic key to open the door into an Egyptiac World which was now
associated with the Syriac Society by the intimate fellowship of sharing
a common Monophysite faith that was menaced by a common ‘Melchitc’
Hellenic adversary. The Egyptiac Society had already merged its long
jealously preserved identity in the Syriac body social before the Roman
regime in Egypt was liquidated by the Arabs; and this captivation of
Egypt by the Syriac culture which the Monophysite movement had
brought about was already complete before a majority of the people of
Egypt underwent a further religious conversion from Monophysite
Christianity to Islam and exchanged their ancestral Coptic mother
tongue for Arabic. 1

In the competition between the Syriac and Hellenic societies for the
assimilation of the debris of a ruined Hittite Society astride the Taurus,
a partition of the prize was dictated by Geography. An Achaemenian
fiat could not avail to give the Aramaic language any effective currency in
the former domain of the Lydian Empire in Western Anatolia, which
was within point-blank range of the radiation of the Hellenic culture
from its Aegean focus; and even in Cappadocia, where a convergent
Hellenic radiation from Sinope and Ephesus was countered by the
proximity of an Aramaic-speaking Syria and Mesopotamia and by the
introduction, under the Achaemenian regime, of an Iranian feudal
aristocracy and a Zoroastrian clergy, the final victory of Hellenism was
demonstrated, as we have seen,* by the Hellenism of the fourth-century
Cappadocian Fathers of the Orthodox Church. South of Taurus on the
other hand—or at any rate east of Amanus, in Northern Syria—the
absorption of the local Hittite communities into a Syriac body social was

1 In Syria, Mesopotamia, and ‘Iraq, where at the time of the Arab conquest the
current vernacular and literary language was the derivative of Aramaic known as Syriac,
the Arabic language in and after the seventh century of the Christian Era enjoyed the
same advantage as had been enjoyed by the Aramaic language in its own antecedent
conquest of 'the Fertile Crescent. The transition from a Semitic Syriac to a likewise
Semitic Arabic was as easy as the transition to a Semitic Aramaic from a likewise
Semitic Canaanite and Akkadian. A Syriac-speaking 'Fertile Crescent' had, however,
like a Coptic-speaking Egypt, already shaken itself free from Hellenism by embracing
the anti-Hellenic Nestorun and Monophysite forms of Christianity before its military
conquest by the Arabs and its subsequent linguistic conquest by Arabic. The role of the
Arabs, their language, and their faith in helping to liberate a submerged Syriac World
from the incubus of an intrusive Hellenism was subsidiary everywhere except in the
Phoenicians' former colonial domain round the Western Mediterranean. In North-West
Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, the Balearic Islands. Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, the
Arabic language and Islam were the instruments by which a Hellenism that, except
in Sicily, was here clad in a Latin dress was evicted or submerged in the eighth and ninth
centuries of the Christian Era. It is true that in North-West Africa a ‘native’ cultural
reaction against an Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ had found a religious expression, three hundred
years before the advent of Islam, in the fourth-century revolt of Donatism against
Catholicism. But Donatism had never succeeded in winning the decisive victory over
Catholicism in North-West Africa that Monophysitism had won over Catholicism in
Egypt and Syria, and the mission of defeating Hellenism in the religious arena was thus
left In North-West Africa for Islam to execute. * On p. 415, above.

446 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
merely delayed, 1 without being permanently averted, when in the post-
Alexandrine Age this region was intensively planted with Greek colonists by
Antigonus Monophthalmus and Sclcucus NicatorandNicator’s Seleucid
successors. The mass-secession of the rural population of Syria from a
Hellenizing Catholic Christianity to an anti-Hellenic Monophysitism in
the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian Era made manifest the
startling truth that an Antioch which had been founded as a base for
Hellenic military and political power and as a transmitting station for
the Hellenic culture was still, in the ninth century of her brilliant life,
a closely invested Hellenic enclave in the midst of a beleaguering Syriac
country-side whose passive siege of the intrusive alien imperial city had
been invisibly maintained below the surface of a dispensation in which
Hellenism had fancied itself to be dominant.

The vastness of these pacific conquests which were achieved by the
Syriac culture during an age of Hellenic ascendancy between the over¬
throw of the Achacmenian Empire and the establishment of the Arab
Caliphate stands out in striking contrast to the frustration of contem¬
porary Syriac attempts to evict an Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ by force of arms.
The Romans’ crushing defeat of a Maccabaean and Zealot Jewish
advance-guard’s forlorn hope west of Euphrates is less impressive than
their equal success in preventing an Arsacid and Sasanid Iranian main
body of the militant Syriac opponents of Hellenism from making any
permanent reconquests west of Iran and 'Iraq. 2 Khusru Parwlz’s Persian
cavalry who forced their way as far west as Calchcdon in Asia and
Tripoli in Africa during the last and most devastating of the Romano-
Pcrsian wars (gerebatur a.d. 603-28) made no more lasting gains of
territory than Pacorus’s Parthian cavalry who had ranged over Syria in
51-50 and again in 40-38 b.c. A militancy which was thus so ineffective
on its own plane did, however, make history on the religious plane by
perversely distracting two higher religions from their oecumenical mis¬
sion of bringing human souls into a closer communion with God in
order to enlist these churches as combatants in the trivial mundane
military enterprise of liberating a subjugated Syriac Society’s domain
from the incubus of an interloping Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ 3 —as the
Nestorian and Monophysitc forms of Christianity were subsequently
diverted from the service of Christianity’s authentic spiritual purpose
to the role of being used as weapons by the Syriac Civilization in a mortal
combat with Hellenism in an ecclesiastical arena.

In a twentieth-century Westernizing World a Jewish and a Zoro-
astrian Church whose origins could be traced back to the experiences of
the internal proletariat of a disintegrating Babylonic Civilization 4 were
still in existence side by side with four younger religions of the same
species—Christianity, Islam, the MahSySna, and Hinduism—which had
been brought to birth by similar experiences in the history of a disintegra¬
ting Hellenic Society. All six religions were still on the map, and all
six had once made their epiphany in the World during the decline and

1 It had begun as early as the fourteenth century* B.C. (see p. 506, n. 2, below).

* See pp. 412-13, above.

J Sec V. v. 124-7.

♦ See V. v. 120-2

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE EGYPTIAC WORLD 4 47
fall of one of the civilizations of the second generation. 1 In the course
of their subsequent histories, however, the post-Hellenic and the post-
Babylonic group of higher religions had travelled along such widely
divergent lines that, if the record of their origins had been lost, their
specific affinity with one another might have been difficult to recognize.
While the four post-Hellcnic religions had duly continued to fulfil their
promise of preaching a gospel to all Mankind, Zoroastrianism and
Judaism had found compensation for their mundane failure to liberate
a subjugated Syriac Society from an Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ in their
spiritually still more devastating subsequent mundane success in con¬
verting themselves into a ‘social cement’ possessing the astonishing
property of being able to hold together a fossilized community in
diaspori.*

This parochial mundane task was as remote as any function could
well be from the oecumenical otherworldly mission with which Judaism
and Zoroastrianism, no less than their sister higher religions, had
originally been charged; and on this showing the two post-Babylonic
higher religions must be judged to have committed the sin or suffered
the calamity of throwing away or losing their high spiritual birthright.
The parallel history of the Ncstorian and Monophysite forms of
Christianity, which likewise eventually converted themselves into a
‘social cement’ for giving cohesion to fossilized communities in diaspord,
indicates that the common aberration into which these two Syriacis-
ing Christian churches and the two post-Babylonic higher religions fell
was not the fore-ordained consequence of some original and intrinsic
spiritual flaw in their doctrine, precept, and 6thos, but was the penalty
for their historic error of allowing themselves to be caught in political
entanglements; for all the Christian churches did not go the Mono-
physitc and Nestorian way. When the Nestorian and Monophysite
offshoots of Christianity took the fatal Jewish and Zoroastrian wrong
turning, the main body of the Christian Church did not make the same
mistake of allowing a mundane quarrel between Monophysites and
‘Melchites’ to distract it irrevocably from the pursuit of its oecumenical
otherworldly purpose.

4. Encounters zeith the Egyptiac Civilization in the Age of 'the
New Empire ' 1

In a drama in which the Egyptiac Civilization was the protagonist, the
opening gambit was the same as in the tragedy of the Babylonic Civiliza¬
tion, with the Egyptiac Society anticipating the Babylonic Society’s
role, and the Hyksos barbarian invaders of Syria and Egypt setting in
motion a tragic train of events by giving the same provocation to
Egyptiac marchmen in the Thebaid as the Aramaean barbarian in¬
vaders of Mesopotamia were to give to the Assyrian wardens of the
northern marches of the Babylonic World. In both tragedies a hard-
pressed civilization responded to the challenge of barbarian aggression

» The sequence of divers species of the genus Humin Society is set out in Tsble IV
in VII. vii, facing p. 772.

448 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

by succumbing to a militarism that had originally been foreign to its
nature;' and in both, likewise, this militarism was eventually fatal to its
addicts as well as to their victims.

The temporary inundation of Egypt by the Hyksos in the seventeenth
century B.c., like the tide of Aramaean aggression against Assyria in the
eleventh and tenth centuries b.c., was a backwash from a cataclysm pro¬
duced by the dissolution of a neighbouring universal state. We have ob¬
served that the Aramaean assailants of Assyria were the extreme right wing
of a host of Aramaean and Hebrew barbarians from the North Arabian
Steppe whose main body had been drawn into a political vacuum in
Syria arising from the collapse there of an Egyptian imperial regime in
the fourteenth century b.c. In a different context 2 we have also noticed
that the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt were the Canaanite counterparts of
a host of Aryan Eurasian Nomad barbarians who in the eighteenth or the
seventeenth century B.c. had poured into the derelict Mesopotamian,
Anatolian, and Syrian domains of a Sumeric universal state that had
fallen into decrepitude immediately after its ephemeral restoration by
Hammurabi (imperabat 1792-1750 or 1728-1686 b.c.). j The Aramaeans’
challenge to Assyria provoked, as we have seen, an Assyrian assault in
the ninth and eighth centuries b.c. upon a Syriac Civilization, affiliated
to the Minoan, which had arisen meanwhile in the former Syrian domain
of 'the New Empire’ of Egypt which the Mesopotamian Aramaeans’
kinsmen had invaded from the east. The Hyksos’ challenge to the
Thebaid similarly provoked an Egyptian assault in the sixteenth and
fifteenth centuries b.c. 4 upon an abortive First Syriac Civilization which
—but for the Hyksos’ transgression against the Egyptiac World and the
Theban liberators’ revanche —might have taken its place, side by side
with the Hittite and the Babylonic Society, as one of the civilizations of
the second generation which the disintegration of the Sumeric Civiliza¬
tion had brought to birth.*

In following up their liberation of Egypt from the Hyksos by their
conquest of their defeated Hyksos adversaries’ Syrian base of operations,
the Theban militarists of the Eighteenth Pharaonic Dynasty not only
prevented a Syriac Civilization affiliated to the Sumeric from coming to
birth; they also brought the Egyptiac World into contact with the two

1 In spite of the standing temptation to succumb to militarism by which Assyria
was beset in her exposed position as an outpost—first of the Sumeric World and then of
its Babylonic successor—the first appearance of the Assyrians on the stage of History
was in the guise of peaceful men of business whose commercial colonies in Eastern
Anatolia in the third millennium b.c. had to be rescued from ill-treatment at the hands
of a native ruler by military action on the part of the Akkadian militarist Sargon of
Agade (see I. i. i to, with n. 3). It required the two successive challenges of a Mitannian
and an Aramaean oppression to convert the Assyrian traders of the third millennium
into the Assyrian warriors of the last. In a pacific-minded Egyptiac World the wardens
of the southern marches over against the barbarians of the Upper Nile Valley had always
been exceptions to the general rule of the Egyptiac £thos; and this explains why ‘the
Old Kingdom’, ‘the Middle Empire’, and 'the New Empire’ in turn all owed their forc¬
ible establishment to the military prowess of southern empire-builder3 (see II. ii. 112).
The violence of the xenophobia evoked in Egyptiac souls by the Hyksos domination
enabled the Theban liberators of Lower Egypt from the Hyksos yoke temporarily to
communicate the traditional militarism of the Thebaid to the rest of the Egyptiac
World. 2 I n H, ii. 388-91.

J See the Note on Chronology in vol. x, pp. 167-212, below.

* Sec V. vi. 198-9. s See II. ii. 388-91.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE EGYPTIAC WORLD 449

post-Sumeric civilizations that did succeed in establishing themselves.
The contact with a nascent Babylonic World did not evoke any appre¬
ciable reaction, since the Babylonic march-state, Assyria, had as much
as she could do from the seventeenth to the fourteenth century b.c. in
saving herself from being overwhelmed by a successor-state of the
defunct Empire of Sumer and Akkad which had been established in
Mesopotamia by the Aryan Eurasian Nomad barbarian Mitannians, 1
while the interior of the Babylonic World was lying torpid under the
sluggish rule of the highlander barbarian Kassitcs. On the other hand,
in impinging on a nascent Hittite Society that was taking shape in the
Empire of Sumer and Akkad’s former East Anatolian domain, the
Theban builders of an Egyptian Empire in South-West Asia involved
the Egyptiac Society in a hundred years’ war (gerebatur circa 1370-
1278 b.c.) for supremacy in South-West Asia which, like the latter-day
Romano-Persian contest for the same elusive prize, was as exhausting
to both combatants as it was inconclusive in its political results.

In this case, as in that, a barbarian onlooker was the tertius gaudem;
and, when an avalanche of mass-migration set in motion by the death-
agonies of a moribund Minoan World descended upon the Hittite
Empire and the Egyptian Empire in succession, the Hittites suffered at
the Sea Peoples’ hands what was to be the Persians’ fate, and the
Egyptians what was to be the Romans’, at the hands of the Arabs. The
Hittite Power was annihilated, while the Egyptian Imperial Government
just succeeded, by a supreme effort, in saving the homeland of the
Egyptiac Civilization in the Nile Valley at the price of abandoning the
residue of its former dominions in Syria. 1

1 See the Note on Chronology in vol. x. pp. 199-201.

* In the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. the Hittite Power was in contact, not
only with ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt in Syria, but with an Achaean Power along the
south-west coast of Anatolia. An exhaustive treatment of the relations between the
Hittites and the Achacans, in the light of all the evidence known to Modem Western
scholars at the time, will be found in C. Schachermeyr’s Hethiter und Ach&tr (Leipzig
1935, Harrassowitz). Schachermeyr marshals convincing arguments in favour of the
tentative conclusion that the Achaean Power which figures in the archives of the Hittite
imperial capital Boghazqat'eh was identical with the Power whose imperial capital was
Mycenae and whose ’thalassocracy' in the Aegean in the fourteenth and thirteenth cen¬
turies B.c. was the prize of a victorious assault upon an antecedent Minoan ’thalassocracy’
whose imperial capital had been Cnossos.

In contrast to the hostility which was the usual relation between Khatti and Egypt
during the hundred years ending in the peace settlement of 1278 b.c., the contemporary
relations between Khatti and the Achaean ’thalassocracy’ seem usually to have been
friendly. When the Hittite Emperor MurftiliS 11 was suffering from an illness in the fourth
year of a reign which approximately coincided with the third quarter of the fourteenth
century, 'the god of Akhkhiyawa’ was one of three divinities who were brought to his
bedside to heal him; and this evidence of mutual goodwill is the more remarkable con¬
sidering that by that date the Achaean Power had already crossed the Hittite Power’s
political path by establishing a bridgehead on the mainland of Anatolia in Millawanda
(Schachermeyr, op. cit., p. 44; G6tze, A.: ‘Die Annalen des MuriiliS’, in MitttUmgtn
dcr Vo'deratiaiisch-Aegyptiichen Gesellschafl, 38. Band (Leipzig 1933, Hinrichs), p.
37)—a locality adjoining Lukina which appears, on the evidence of place-names men¬
tioned in the Hittite documents (Schachermeyr, op. cit., p. 67), to have lain in South-
Western Caria, even if we do not identify the name Millawanda itself with the Miletus
of the Hellenic geographers gazetteer.

The delicate situation arising out of this encroachment by the sea-power on the land-
power’s clement seems to have been handled on both sides with sufficient tact to prevent
it from resulting in a war when, at some subsequent date which may have been before
the end of MurStliS II’* reign (ibid., p. 45), a Hittite subject named Piamaradu took refugo
in Millawanda with seven thousand adherents, and gave his two daughters in marriage

B 2808 .vin Q

450 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

If this were the whole story of the encounters with the Egyptiac
Civilization in the age of ‘the New Empire’, it would have little sig¬
nificance for the student of History-; but in this instance a familiar talc
of aggression, revenge, and mutual exhaustion is redeemed by one flash of
revelation in a single soul. As far as we know, Ikhnaton was the first of
the sons of Man to apprehend the unity and universality of God ;* and
this Pisgah-sight unfolded itself to the eyes of the seer from the eminence
of an imperial throne which, under its oecumenical dominion, had
brought the Egyptiac World into association with an alien civilization in
Syria 2 and with a primitive culture in the Upper Nile Valley.

‘The lands of Syria and Nubia and the land of Egypt—Thou puttest
every man in his place and Thou suppliest their needs.... Thou art lord of
them all, who wearieth himself on their behalf; the lord of every land,
who ariseth from them.... All far-off peoples—Thou makest that whereon
they live.’*

If the philosopher Ikhnaton had not also been the Emperor Amenhotep
IV, he might never have beheld a vision which an oecumenical autocrat’s

to two Achaean subjects who were then holding Millawanda on their sovereign’s behalf.
When representations from the Court of Khatti to the Court of Akhkhiyawa on the sub¬
ject of Piamaradu’s future met with a reply which the Court of Khatti felt to be un¬
satisfactory, the Hittitc Emperor put himself politically in the wrong by invading
Millawanda without gaining his object of laying hands on Piamanidu. The Hittitc
refugee and his adherents avoided capture by taking ship from Millawanda to some
adjacent overseas portion of the King of Akhkhiyawa’9 dominions, from which they
threatened to make descents upon the Hittitc coasts. Thereupon the Hittitc Emperor
wrote a further letter to the Achaean King, apologizing for his occupation of Milla¬
wanda and requesting him either to banish Piamaradu from his dominions altogether or,
as an alternative, to intem him somewhere in the metropolitan territories of the Achaean
Empire where he would be at a greater distance from the Hittitc Empire’s frontiers.

This fragment of Hittite-Achacan diplomatic correspondence (summarized ibid., pp.
30 - 33 ) that had been retrieved by Modem Western archaeologists threw a flicker of light
on an Hellenic legend that had been noticed by Thucydides in the introduction (Book I,
chap. 9) to his history of the Atheno-Pcloponnesian War of 431-404 B.C. According to
this story the Peloponnesus derived its name from an Anatolian adventurer named Pclops,
who had won the principality of Pisa for himself by a piece of sharp practice and had
afterwards secured a footing at Mycenae by giving his daughter in marriage to the reign¬
ing Perscid King Sthcnclus. On the strength of this family alliance, Pelops' son Atreus
had managed to succeed his nephew Eurystheu*—Sthenclus’s son and Pelops’grandson
—on the throne of Mycenae. In this Hellenic legend the Hittite Emperor Muriilii II
figures as Myrtilus, the prince of Pisa's charioteer, whom Pclops first induced to betray
his master and then liquidated by pushing him over a cliff into the sea. Docs Pelops
derive his own name from the Hittite Empire’s frontier province Pal 5 ? And is Atreus a
legendary ghost of the historical Achaean buccaneer Attarissiya, who made himself a
nuisance to the Hittitc Empire in the reigns of Tutkhaliya IV (imperabat circa 1260-1230
B.c.) and Arnuwanda (imperabat circa 1230-1215 B.C.) oy driving the Emperor’s feuda¬
tory MadduwattaS out of his fief and by making a descent upon Cyprus (ibid., pp. 4 t

GesclUchaft (E.V.), 32. Jahrgang (Leipzig 1927, Hinrichs), pp. u, 15-17, and 39)?

The present footnote replaces V. v. 237, n. 7.

1 See I. i. 145-6 and V. v. 695-

2 The century immediately preceding Ikhnaton’s accession to the Egyptiac imperial
throne had seen an influx into Egypt of foreigners of all races from all quarters—first
in military, then in civil, employments. Imported foreign slaves had risen in the Egyptiac
social scale to a level above that of the native Egyptiac peasantry, and the Egyptians
with whom these immigrants had intermingled had been adopting Syrian and Myce¬
naean manners and customs and cults (see Wilson, J. A.: The Burden of Egypt (Chicago
Z 95 L University of Chicago Press), pp. 186-93). The Imperial House set an example
when Thothmes IV married a daughter of King Artatama of Mitanni; and there were
at least two more royal marriages between the Egyptian and the Mitannian dvnasty
(Wilson, op. cit., pp. 201-2). This was the historical background to Ikhnaton’s new
departures in the realms of religion, the visual arts, and literature.

3 Ikhnaton’s hymn to the Aton (Sun-Disk), quoted in V. vi. 11-12.

TARES AND WHEAT 451

political vantage-point could bring within his ken, even though his
political authority might be impotent to impose upon the rank-and-file
of his subjects the chillingly intellectual and at the same time disturb¬
ingly revolutionary theology and liturgy in which the imperial recluse
sought to communicate his personal religious experience to an intimate
circle of courtier-initiates. 1

5. Tares and Wheat

Our survey of encounters between contemporaries has made us
aware that the only fruitful results of these encounters are the works of
peace, and most mournfully aware that these creatively peaceful inter¬
changes of ideas and ideals are rare indeed by comparison with the
frequency of the stultifying and disastrous conflicts that arc apt to arise
when two or more diverse cultures come into contact with one another.

If we scan once more the panorama of encounters between civilizations
of the second generation, we shall observe in the intercourse between
the Indie and the Sinic civilization one instance of a peaceful interchange
which seems as fruitful as at first sight it seems free from the blight of
violence. The Mahayana was transmitted to the Sinic from the Indie
World without the two societies ever falling into war with one another,
and the peacefulness of the intercourse that produced this historic effect
was advertised in the traffic of Buddhist missionaries en route from
India to China, and Buddhist pilgrims en route from China to India,
which found its way to and fro by both the sea-route via the Straits of
Malacca and the land-route via the Tarim Basin from the fourth to the
seventh century of the Christian Era.

During this age of peaceful religious intercourse the only incident
remotely resembling a passage of arms between a Chinese and an Indian
Great Power was one highly creditable act of intervention on the
Chinese side in Indian circumstances that forced Chinese hands. On the
morrow of the death of an Hellenic Justinian’s Indie counterpart Harsha
(1 imperabat a.d. 606-47)* at the close of the last phase of the disintegra¬
tion of the Indie Society, an envoy from the T’ang Emperor T’ai Tsung
who happened at that moment to be on his way to the dead Indie
emperor’s court retorted to an Indian usurper’s murderous attack upon
his mission by evacuating his people from Hindustan to Tibet, enlisting
Tibetan and Nepalese reinforcements, and re-entering India manu
militari without yielding to the temptation to which this Chinese warrior-
statesman’s Bactrian Greek predecessor Demetrius had succumbed in
the second century b.c. Instead of taking advantage of the anarchy into
which India had fallen after the disappearance from the scene of the last
upholder of a crumbling Indie universal state, the enterprising repre¬
sentative of the T’ang Power in the seventh century of the Christian Era
exhibited a political disinterestedness that was as remarkable as his
military efficiency. After occupying the last Indie emperor’s derelict

1 Ikhnaton’s failure to impose his Aton-worship in the Egyptiac World has been
discussed in V. v. 695-6. An authoritative discussion of it is now to be found in Wilson,
J. A.: The Burden 0/ Egypt (Chicago 1951, University of Chicago Press), pp. 206-235.

452 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

dominions in a lightning campaign, capturing the usurper, and restoring
order, the ambassador was content to evacuate India for the second
time, and this time under no compulsion, with his trouble-making
prisoner in his train as the only trophy of a beneficent military triumph. 1

This politico-military episode in the history of the relations between a
Far Eastern and an Indie Power is on the same high moral level as the
contemporary religious activities of Chinese pilgrims and Indian mis¬
sionaries; yet our idyllic picture of a pacific encounter between two
civilizations resulting in the transmission of the Mahayana to the Far
East is incomplete and to that extent misleading; for the opening up of
the overland route between India and China via the Tarim Basin—
which was in use earlier than the maritime route and, till after the seventh
century, was also always the more regularly frequented of the two—was
the work, not of the Indie and Sinic societies themselves, but of the
Bactrian Greek pioneers of an intrusive Hellenic Society and these
Greeks’ Kushan barbarian successors; and the establishment of an over¬
land line of communications between the Indie and the Sinic World by
Bactrian Greek and Kushan hands was an incidental result of military
aggression on the Bactrian Greeks’ part against the Mauryan Empire at
a moment when it was impotent to defend itself, and on the Kushans’
part against the Han Empire’s domain in the Tarim Basin in a militarily
opportune hour after the Prior Han Dynasty had lost their grip and
before the Posterior Han had mustered the strength to vindicate their
title to their predecessors’ lost dominion.

If we arc in search of an instance of a spiritually fruitful encounter
between contemporaries in which there is no evidence at all of any con¬
comitant military conflict, we shall have to look farther back into the
past than the age of the civilizations of the second generation to a time
before the Egyptiac Civilization had been galvanized by the shock of the
Hyksos invasion into an unnatural prolongation of an already completed
term of life. 2 In the preceding age, from the turn of the twenty-second
and twenty-first centuries to the turn of the eighteenth and seventeenth
centuries b.c., an Egyptiac universal state in the shape of ‘the Middle
Empire’ and a Sumeric universal state in the shape of the Empire of
Sumer and Akkad had been living side by side with one another, 3 and
alternating in the exercise of an hegemony over the Syrian land-bridge
between their homelands, without, so far as is known, ever falling into
a clash of arms. This apparently peaceful contact between the Egyptiac
and Sumeric societies during their last rally before their final dissolu-

' Sec Smith, V. A.: The Early History of India, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1914, Clarendon
Press), pp. 352-3; Eliot, Sir C.: Hinduism and Buddhism (London 1921, Arnold, 3 vol*.),
vol. in, p. 260.

2 This effect of the impact of the Hyksos on the course of Egyptiac history has been
discussed in I. i. 136-46.

3 In reckoning that the Empire of Sumer and Akkad, from its first foundation by
Ur-Engur (alias Ur-Nammu) of Ur down to its decay after the death of Hammurabi,
began and ended at approximately the same dates as a ‘Middle Empire' of Egypt which
was founded by a Mentuhotcp and was overthrown by the Hyksos, we arc adopting
a revised estimate of Sumeric chronology which places all the principal dates of Sumeric
history 155 years later according to Sidney Smith, or 219 years later according to W. F.
Albright, than they were placed by Eduard Meyer in the light of the scantier archaeo¬
logical evidence at his command (see the Note on Chronology in vol. x, pp. 167-212).

TARES AND WHEAT 453

tion was, however, apparently also sterile; and wc have to look still
farther back than this to find a transaction between these two civiliza¬
tions of the first generation that was not merely untarnished by violence
but was productive of spiritual effects comparable to the transmission
of the MahSySna from India to the Far East.

In the investigation of so early a chapter in the histories of civiliza¬
tions the knowledge gradually accumulated by the progress of Modern
Western archaeological discovery still left the twentieth-century histor¬
ian groping in an historical twilight in which all outlines remained un¬
certain and all movements elusive; yet, subject to this caution, wc may
recall here our tentative finding 1 that the worship of Isis and Osiris,
which came to play so vital a part in Egyptiac spiritual life after the
Egyptiac Society’s breakdown, was not the original expression of an
indigenous spiritual experience but was a gift from a disintegrating
Sumeric World 1 where the heart-rending yet hcart-consoling figures of
the Sorrowing Wife or Mother and her Suffering Husband or Son had
made their earliest epiphany under the names Ishtar and Tammuz. If it
be indeed true that a worship which was the harbinger of all other higher
religions was transmitted from the society in which it had first arisen to
the children of a contemporary civilization without the sinister strife and
bloodshed by which so many of the subsequent encounters between
contemporaries were to be marred, we may have caught here one glimpse
of a bow in the cloud that lowers over the histories of those contacts
between civilizations in which the parties to the encounter have met one
another in the flesh.

1 In V. v. 81-82 and 147-52.

1 If the worship of Ishtar and Tammuz was in truth a response to the challenge of
social disintegration, its epiphany in the Sumeric World, and a fortiori its radiation
from the Sumeric World into the Egyptiac World, cannot have taken place earlier, at
the earliest, than a date mid-way through the third millenium B.C. If so, this was not the
first encounter between these two civilizations of which there was a record. Material
evidence, brought to light by twentieth-century Western archaeologists, testified that
several elements of Sumeric technology and artistic style, perhaps even including the
happy thought of revolutionizing the art of writing by eliciting phonemes out of picto-
crams, had been conveyed from Shinar to Egypt in the closing centuries of an Egyptiac
Late Predynastic Age, at some date during the second half of the fourth millennium B.C.
(see Wilson, J. A.: The Durden of Egypt (Chicago 1951, University of Chicago Press),
pp. 37-38, and the present Study, X. ix. 682-92). The worship of Ishtar and Tammuz
will have come to Egypt from Shinar in the same age as these material culture-elements,
if we are to believe that the East Deltaic group of Egyptiac divinities, in which Osiris
makes his first appearance, took shape in the Predynastic Age as early as the Nagnda II
period, circa 3500 b.c. (sec Scharff, A.: Die Ausbreitung des Osiriskultes in dcr FrQhseit
und u'dhrend des Alien Reiches (Munich 1948, Biederstein), p. 17), and that the worship
of Osiris spread from Busiris to Heliopolis in the age of the First and Second Dynasties
(ibid., p. 19). The earliest extant inscriptions of the Pyramid Texts, which are our
earliest evidence for the practice of Osiris-worship, are on monuments of the Fifth and
Sixth Dynasties (ibid., p. 16).

C. THE DRAMA OF ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN
CONTEMPORARIES (STRUCTURE,
CHARACTERS, AND PLOT)

(I) CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS

T HE foregoing survey of encounters between contemporaries has
made it apparent that these are dramas in which the number of the
dramatis personae is apt to be greater than the minimum cast of two
figures. Encounters t£te-a-t£tc, like the spiritual commerce between the
Sumcric and the Egyptiac Civilization which may have carried the rudi¬
ments of a higher religion from the banks of the Euphrates to the banks
of the Nile, 1 seem to be less frequent than encounters between three
parties, such as the triangular contests for command of the Mediter¬
ranean Basin between the Phoenicians, Etruscans, and Hellenes of a pre-
Alexandrine Age* and between the Medieval Westerners, the Eastern
Orthodox Christians, and the Monophysitc Christian and Muslim repre¬
sentatives of a Syriac Society in a belated last chapter of its history. 3

A not less frequent and perhaps more characteristic type of encounter
is a contest between a protagonist and a deuteragonist for physical and
spiritual dominion over weaker competitors. The second of the two
triangular contests for the military, political, and commercial control of
the Mediterranean Basin turned into a competition between the Franks
and the 'Osmanlis for the subjugation and conversion of Eastern Ortho¬
dox Christians whose failure to hold their own against their two potently
aggressive neighbours had left them no freedom except to make an un¬
palatable choice between these two alternative alien ways of life * but
usually the destiny of more than one wilting society seems to be at stake
in such struggles for possession of souls. The Syriac Society wrestled
with the post-Alexandrine Hellenic Society for the conversion of the
Babylonic and Egyptiac societies as well as for the conversion of the
fossilized remnants of a Hittite Society that lay directly in the fairway
between the homelands of the two rivals; 3 and, in a latter-day world that
had been unified on the technological and economic plane on a literally
oecumenical scale by the Modern Western feat of mastering the Ocean,
the Russian offshoot of the Orthodox Christian Society had armed itself
with the weapons of a Modem Western technique in order to challenge
the Western Society’s influence over all the other living civilizations and
primitive societies. 6

We may now go on to observe that these dramatic encounters between
contemporaries are complex not merely in the point of being apt to
bring a considerable number of characters on to the stage but also in the
further point of being implicated with one another like the successive
tragedies in an Attic trilog}'. The discovery that encounters between
contemporaries may present themselves, not singly, but in concatena-

1 See pp. 452-3, above. _ * See pp. 418-39, above.

* See pp. 346-^03, above. 4 Sec p. 151, with n. 2, and pp. 395-7, above.

s Sec pp. 442-6, above. 4 Sec pp. 126-49, above.

CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS 4 5 S
tions, was made in the fifth century b.c. by the pre-Alexandrine Hellenic
historian Herodotus when he set himself the ambitious task of giving an
illuminating account of the then still recent military and political conflict
between the Achaemcnian Empire and the independent Hellenic city-
states in Continental European Greece. Herodotus’s artistic genius
divined that, in order to make his story intelligible, he must place it in
the setting of its historical antecedents; in viewing it from this angle, he
perceived that the Graeco-Persian conflict which had been his original
theme was the latest episode in a succession of collisions of the same
character; and this insight led him to the discovery that such encounters
between contemporaries are apt to occur, not in isolation, but in series,
and that these scries are not fortuitous, but are the product of psycho¬
logical ‘chain-reactions’ which a post-Modem Western student of
History might compare with the physical ‘chain-reactions’ artificially
produced by the inauspicious ingenuity of latter-day Western men
of science.

In the spiritual field of encounters between human beings which was
the pre-Alexandrine Hellenic historian’s concern, Herodotus worked
out a psychological formula to explain how one encounter could thus
give rise to another. 1 In a situation in which two or more societies have
come into contact with one another, one party takes an initiative which,
from another party’s standpoint, is an act of aggression. This challenge
confronts the assaulted party with a choice between acquiescing and re¬
acting, and, if he acquiesces, or again if he reacts merely to the extent
required in order to rc-catablish the equilibrium which his neighbour’s
wanton act of aggression has upset, this failure to hold his own or, in the
alternative denouement, this successful act of self-defence will bring to
a close not only this particular drama but, with it, the whole of the
action which his adversary’s original act of aggression has started. A
concatenation of encounters in which one tragedy generates another
arises when the original victim of aggression is not content simply to
redress a balance which the original aggressor has disturbed, but pro¬
ceeds to pass over into a counter-offensive in which he despoils his dis¬
comfited adversary of the ugly role of aggressor in order to clothe himself
in his turn in this deadly shirt of Nessus.

This demonic impulse to put oneself in the wrong is one of the fatal
fruits of Original Sin in Human Nature;

For Old Sin loves, when comes the hour again,

To bring forth New. 1

The ‘new sin’ of indulging in a retaliation disproportionate to the provo¬
cation for it is at least as grievous an act of hybris, and as infallible a
means of incurring the penalty that hybris invariably brings in its train,
as the ‘old sin’ of unprovoked aggression, by which it has been brought
forth; and the penalty is the starting of a chain-reaction which, once set
in motion, is inordinately difficult to arrest.

i Herodotus, Book I. chaps. 1-4. , , . ......

a Aeschylus: Agamemnon, U. 763-6, Gilbert Murrays translation, quoted in IV. iv.
256.

456 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

We may profit by Herodotus’s discovery of concatenations of en¬
counters and accept the psychological formula in which he finds the ex¬
planation of this historical phenomenon' without having to accept, as
integral parts of it, either his personal reconstruction of the particular
series of encounters leading up to the Hclleno-Achacmenian War of
499-449 b . c . 2 or his depiction of the chain-reaction of hybris in the naive

« It will be noticed that the repetitive action which generates a concatenation of en¬
counters according to the Herodotcan formula is the same rhythm that in this Study
(III. iii. 112-27) has been detected in the process of the internal growth of a civilization.
In both processes the motive power is provided by the recurrent upsetting of an equili¬
brium which is repeatedly re-established only to be upset each time once again; and,
if we translate the language of mechanics into terms more appropriate to a phenomenon
which is not a physical movement of inanimate objects but is a psychological reaction
of living creatures, we shall find ourselves describing each of our two sets of recurrent
reactions in identical terms as a series of challenges which succeed one another because
a successful response to one challenge gives rise to a fresh challenge which in its turn
evokes a further challenge through having been faced and met successfully. There is thus
a generic affinity between the encounter-rhythm and the growth-rhythm; but, when we
pursue our comparative analysis of them in greater detail, we also become aware of
differences that distinguish them from one another. In the encounter-rhythm the identity
of both the challenger and the challenged party changes from round to round ex hypo-
theti, since the upsetting of a re-established equilibrium, which produces a repetition of
the movement, is here always due to the initiative of the party which has been the
recipient and not the author of the challenge in the previous round, whereas in the
growth-rhythm the role of recipient is played by the same party in round after round,
and it is this continuity in the identity of the challcngec that gives the growth-rhythm
its specific character of cumulativeness within the generic form of repetitiveness. The
ethical complexion of the challenge that evokes each fresh round is also different in the
two rhythms; for an initiative that in the growth-rhythm is an act of God or Satan (sec
I. i. 271-99)»» in the encounter-rhythm an act of human hybris.

1 We shall agree with Herodotus in seeing in the conflict between the Hellenes and the
Achaemenidae in the fifth century B.c. the continuation of an older conflict between the
Hellenes and the Phoenicians. In fact, we shall see these two conflicts ns successive
phases in the course of a single encounter; and we shall therefore reject Herodotus’s
insertion of two intervening links at this point in the chain. According to Herodotus
the encounter between the Hellenes and the Phoenicians was followed by one between
the Hellenes and the Colchians and another between the Hellenes and the Trojans
before the Persians took up the cudgels in an imaginary feud between an Hellenic
’Europe’ and an Oriental ‘Asia’. We may agree with Herodotus that the establishment
of an Hellenic ascendancy over the backward peoples round the coasts of the Black
Sea, which is commemorated in the Hellenic legend of the voyage of the Argonauts,
must have been later in date than the beginning of the competition between Hellenes
and Phoenicians, since the Hellenes did not secure their monopoly of maritime activity
in the Black Sea until after they had defeated the Phoenician and Tyrrhenian attempts
to compete with them for the command of the entrance to the Dardanelles (see pp. 420-1,
above); but we cannot agree that the Phoenicians and the Colchians ever had any notion
that they were fighting their respective battles with the Hellenes in a common Asiatic
cause. And, as for Herodotus’s interpolation of ‘the Trojan War’ between the date of
the Hellenes' penetration into the Black Sea, which docs not seem to have begun till
after the opening of the seventh century b.c., and the date of the Lydian conquest of the
Continental Asiatic Hellenes, which Herodotus treats as a prelude to the Persian assault
on Hellas, this only shows how wildly wide of the mark were the endeavours of fifth-
century Hellenic rationalists to transmute legend into history. In so far as the Hellenic
legend of 'the Trojan War’ is a travesty* of any authentic historical event, it preserves
the memory of a Vclkerwanderung in the Aegean area which had accompanied the dis¬
solution of a Minoan Society and preceded the rise of an Hellenic and a Syriac Society
out of the wreckage of a shattered Minoan World. The competition between the Hellenic
Society and the Phoenician representatives of the sister Syriac Civilization did not begin
till at least four hundred years after the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung had come to a
close.

The Modem Western archaeologists’ feat of disinterring a Minoan Civilization of
which the Hellenes had been almost oblivious gave a twentieth-century Western his¬
torian an overwhelming advantage over Herodotus when it was a auestion of trying to
reconstruct the history of the late second millennium and the early last millennium B.c.
But Herodotus’s errors in his reconstruction of links in a concatenation of encounters
which he could reconstruct only by guesswork in the absence of records did not, of
course, impugn his presentation of oecumenical history as a concatenation of encounters

CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS 457
imager)' of the manners and customs of the Heroic Age 1 or his presenta¬
tion of this chronic conflict as a feud between ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ ; 2 and,
if we do find ourselves convinced that the Herodotean analysis of the
psychological causation of concatenations is valid, we can apply the
formula on our own account to the encounter between the Achaemenian
Empire and the Continental European Hellenes and see how far it may
carry us from this point of departure in establishing associations between
encounters which, in our foregoing survey, we have provisionally studied
separately, as so many self-contained dramas, and not as inter-related
episodes strung together on one continuous thread.

In our own reconstruction of the concatenation in which the Helleno-
Achaemenian War of 499-449 b . c . is one of the links, we may follow
Herodotus to the extent of finding the starting-point of the action in a
contest between the Phoenicians and the Hellenes for the command of
the Mediterranean Basin; but, on our own previous interpretation of
this encounter, we shall find the ‘beginning of evils’* in the Hellenes’
aggressive attempt, in and after the last quarter of the seventh century
B.C., to add to their own lion’s share of the spoils of a new world by
making provocative encroachments on the Phoenicians’ preserves in
Andalusia, Western Sicily, and Tripolitania. The reaction which this act
of Hellenic aggression evoked on the Phoenicians’ part resulted, as
we have seen, after a hundred years of strife, in the restoration of
equilibrium through the establishment of a Carthaginian and an Achac-
mcnian Empire each commanding a collective power to keep the unco¬
ordinated aggression of the mutually independent Hellenic communities
of the day within bounds on both the western and the eastern front of
the Mediterranean arena. 4 The fatal act of counter-hybris which upset a
re-established balance and thereby set the stage for the performance of
a further tragedy was Darius’s decision to seek a solution for the problem
of the Achaemenian Empire’s awkward north-west frontier by setting

between representatives of diverse and conflicting’ civilizations. So far from that, these
mistakes about matters of fact which for Herodotus were unknown and unknowable
threw into relief the brilliance of an intuition which could divine one of the major
rhythms of History from such imperfect evidence as the information at Herodotus's
command.

« It is not till he comes, in Book I, chapter 6, to record the subjugation of the Conti¬
nental Asiatic Hellenes by Croesus King of Lydia in the sixth century B.c. that Herodotus
begins to depict encounters between Hellenes and non-Hellenes in the colours of so-
called ’civilized’ life. Down to that point he deals in terms of the barbarian manners
and customs of the Heroic Age. In the first four incidents in his concatenation the aggres¬
sive act of provocation takes the form of the abduction of a princess. The Phoenicians
start the feud by abducting an Hellenic Io; the Hellenes retaliate by abducting a Phoeni¬
cian Europa; the Hellenes then cross the line between retaliation and provocation, to
become aggressors in their turn, by abducting a Colchian Medea, and the Trojans
retaliate by abducting an Hellenic Helen. After failing to obtain amends for this retalia¬
tory injury, the Hellenes then commit a second act of hybris, fraught with far graver
consequences than their first, by resorting to war to avenge an abduction which they
could have well afforded to ignore ’since it was obvious that these women would not
have got themselves abducted if they had not so desired’. The act of military aggression
which the Hellenes committed against the Asiatics in attacking and destroying Troy
placed Hellas in a permanent state of war with Asia in the opinion ascribed by Herodotus
to latter-day Persian champions of the Asiatic cause. This Herodotean account of pre-
Croesan history is, of course, a prose version of the traditional Hellenic epic vein of

P °» §ee Annex: “’Asia” and ‘‘Europe’’: Facts and Fantasies’, on pp. 708-29, below.

J See Thucydides, Book II, chap. iz. 4 See pp. 421-9. “bovc.

B M&S.nu Q 2

458 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
out to compel the still independent part of the Hellenic World to submit
to an Achaemenian domination. 1 The sensational defeat of this act of
counter-hybris did not prevent it from making history; for its failure to
attain its own objective was only the first instalment of the penalty that
it drew down upon the heads of its perpetrators. The ultimate nemesis of
Darius’s aberration was Philip of Macedon’s decision to turn the tables
by conquering the Achaemenian Empire; and Alexander the Great, who
was as sensationally successful as Xerxes had been sensationally un¬
successful in executing his father’s political testament, opened the first
act in a new drama which forged the second link in this tragic concatena¬
tion.

The destruction of the Achaemenian Empire in the fourth century
B.c. by Alexander and of the Carthaginian Empire in the third century
b.c. by Rome gave the Hellenic Society a dominion over its neighbours
which far exceeded the most ambitious dreams of sixth-century Hellenic
adventurers who had sailed as traders to Tartessus or served as mercen¬
aries at Pelusium or Babylon. In the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic
history the Hellenes were masters not only of the Libyphoenician and
Etruscan colonial domains of the Syriac and fossil Hittite societies in the
Western Mediterranean but of these two societies’ homelands in the
Levant and of the Egyptiac, Babylonic, and Indie worlds into the bar¬
gain. This portentous career of post-Alexandrine Hellenic aggression
duly evoked a reaction on its Oriental victims’ part; and the eventual
success of this reaction tardily restored a long-upset equilibrium when,
a thousand years after Alexander’s passage of the Dardanelles, the un¬
doing of his work was at last completed by the Primitive Muslim Arabs’
feat of liberating, in lightning campaigns of an all but Alexandrine swift¬
ness, all ci-devant Syriac territories, from Syria to the Iberian Peninsula
inclusive, that at the opening of the seventh century of the Christian Era
had still been under the rule of the Roman Empire and its Visigothic
successor-state.

The re-establishment of a Syriac universal state in the shape of an
Arab Caliphate which embraced under its single sovereignty the former
domains of both the Carthaginian and the Achaemenian Empire 2 prom¬
ised in the second decade of the eighth century of the Christian Era to
terminate a concatenation of encounters, at a stage at which not more than
two links in the melancholy chain had yet been forged, by reproducing
the stabilization that had been momentarily achieved in the last quarter
of the sixth century b.c. through the rise of the Carthaginian and Achae-
mcnian Powers. Indeed, the prospects of stability were decidedly more
promising this time than they had been on the earlier occasion, since the
Caliphate was stronger in its unity than the Achaemenian and Cartha¬
ginian empires had been in their mutual independence, while the two
nascent Hellenistic civilizations of Western and Eastern Orthodox
Christendom were less capable of challenging the alien oecumenical
Power that had set bounds to their domains than the Hellenic Civiliza¬
tion had been in the vigour of its sixth-century adolescence. This second
chance of bringing the momentum of strife to a halt by jettisoning the
1 See pp. 430-5, above. * See I. i. 76-77.

CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS 459
burden of karma 1 from which this momentum derived its impetus was,
however, once again thrown away by wanton acts of counter-hybris.

Like their Persian predecessors, the Arab avengers of a Syriac
Society that had been the victim of Hellenic aggression were not content
with their historically legitimate achievement of at last completing the
eviction of an aggressor from alien territories on which he had trespassed
by force of arms. They proceeded to repeat Darius’s error of passing
over into a counter-offensive without having the excuse of finding
themselves saddled with an untenable frontier that must be moved for¬
ward if it was not to be set back. The pressure of physical geography
that impelled Darius and Xerxes to seek a natural frontier by embracing
European as well as Asiatic Greece in their dominions did not constrain
the Arabs to pass the natural frontier of the Taurus in order to lay siege
to Constantinople in a.d. 673-7 and again in a.d. 717 or the natural
frontier of the Pyrenees in order to invade Gaul in a.d. 732 or the natural
frontier of the western basin of the Mediterranean Sea in order to
conquer Crete and Sicily and overrun Apulia and seize bridgeheads
along the Mediterranean coast of Western Christendom between the
mouth of the Rhdne and the mouth of the Garigliano in the ninth
century of the Christian Era. 2 These wanton acts of Muslim aggression
against Eastern Orthodox and Western Christendom in the eighth and
ninth centuries incurred their nemesis in the shape of East Roman and
Frankish acts of retaliation in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and,
though the East Roman counter-offensive broke off as a consequence
of the breakdown of the Orthodox Christian Civilization, the Western
Crusades went to lengths at which they forged a third link in an Hero-
dotean concatenation of tragic encounters. 3

This explosive expansion of a Medieval Western Christendom
whose latent energies had been fired by the spark of Muslim aggression
in the eighth and ninth centuries of the Christian Era evoked the reac¬
tion that was to be expected on the part of its victims. The cumulative
efforts of Zengi, Nur-ad-Din, Saladin, and the Ayyubids’ Mamluk slave-
successors evicted the Frankish intruders from Syria, and the 'Osmanlis
completed the Greek Orthodox Christians’ unfinished work of evicting
them from Romania as well. When the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II the
Conqueror (imfterabat a.d. 1451-81) had accomplished his life-work, a
thrice-upset equilibrium had been restored for the third time in this
concatenation of historical tragedies, and a third chance of breaking the
chain had presented itself; but, this time once again, the opportunity
was lost through a wanton act of counter-hybris.

While the Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople had been content to
bring together within the political framework of an Ottoman universal
state the disiecta membra of the main body of Orthodox Christendom,

1 The Indie conception of Karma has been touched upon in V. v. 432-3.

* See pp. 348-9, above. . .

J One effect of this concatenation between the Syriac Society s successive encounters
with the Hellenic Society in its pre-Alexandrine and in its post-Alcxandrine phase and
with the two Hellenistic Christian societies was to produce ‘Sicilian Cycles’ that are the
theme of one of Freeman’s most illuminating essays (Freeman, E. A.: Historical Essays,
3rd scr., 2nd ed. (London 1892, Macmillan), pp. 434-42).

460 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
his successors Selim the Grim and Suleyman the Magnificent recklessly
overstepped the limits within which their wiser predecessor had found
a fruitful field for constructive statesmanship. They annexed the domain
of the Arabic Muslim Civilization from Syria to the Yaman and from
'Iraq to Algeria inclusive; and they opened an attack upon the homeland
of Western Christendom on both a Danubian and a Western Mediter¬
ranean front. This Ottoman Muslim aggression against Western Christ¬
endom at the opening of the modern chapter of its history had the same
explosively stimulating effect as the Arab Muslim aggression against the
same Western Christian Society at the opening of the medieval chapter
of its history and the Achaemenian aggression against European Greece
in the fifth century B.c. The Ottoman sieges of Vienna in a.d. 1529 and
a.d. 1682-3 ended in the same sensational failure as the Arab sieges of
Constantinople in a.d. 673-7 and A.D. 717 and as the Persian descents
upon European Greece in 490 and 480 b.c. But the envelopment of
Western Christendom by the horns of the Ottoman crescent nevertheless
came near enough to success to do the Westerners the invaluable un¬
intended service of compelling them to cut losses which they had already
incurred through the failure of the Crusades and to divert their energies
from continuing to fight a lost battle for command of a Mediterranean
cul-de-sac to embarking on a conquest of the Ocean which was to give
them the dominion over the whole face of the planet.

The consequent world-wide expansion of the Modern Western Civili¬
zation forged a fourth link in the Herodotean concatenation of en¬
counters ; but at the time of writing it was impossible to foretell whether
this self-extending chain of tragedies was to be terminated as a tetralogy,
with a modern satyr play for its finale, or whether it was to be prolonged
beyond a fourth episode; for at the time of writing the fourth link in the
chain was still in process of being heated in the furnace and hammered
out on the anvil of the malign artificer Hephaestus. On the analogy of
the three preceding dramas in the series it was no doubt to be expected
that the unprecedentedly far-ranging and violent explosion of the
Modern West, which had opened the current play, would evoke a re¬
action of comparable range and force; and mid-way through the twen¬
tieth century of the Christian Era a would-be reader of the signs of the
times might be tempted to cast Russia for the part of organizer of the
resistance movement against an arch-aggressor which had been played
in previous episodes by the ’Osmanlis and Umayyads and Achaemenidae.
A twentieth-century historian, on the other hand, would be less inclined
to hazard such conjectures about the future than to be grateful that the
accident of his own date of birth should have enabled him to observe, as
matters of accomplished fact, three links in the Herodotean concatena¬
tion which had been added to the chain between Herodotus’s day and
his own.

Now that we have followed up the Herodotean concatenation, link by
link, from the three-cornered contest between the Phoenicians, Etrus¬
cans, and pre-Alexandrinc Hellenes for the command of the Mediter¬
ranean Basin down to the high-powered impact of the Modern West on
all other living societies on the face of the planet, this guiding thread

CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS 461
will enable us to discern at least one other chain-reaction of the same
kind which was originally set in motion by a backwash from one of the
waves of barbarian invasion that flooded over the derelict domain of a
moribund Sumeric Civilization in the eighteenth or the seventeenth
century B.c.

In other contexts we have already noticed that the Aryan Nomad bar¬
barian invaders who broke out of the Eurasian Steppe and over the
Iranian Plateau into the Mesopotamian and Syrian provinces of ‘the
Empire of the Four Quarters’ in the course of a post-Sumcric Volkcr-
wanderung had Semitic-speaking contemporaries and counterparts in
Palestine who engulfed the Delta province of ‘the Middle Empire’ of
Egypt. 1 The deceptive facility with which the Hyksos established their
dominion over the Egyptiac Society in this initial act of aggression gave
no inkling of the demonic violence of the Egyptiac reaction with which
they were to be expelled, a hundred years or so later, from the Nile
Valley and to be pursued subsequently into Syria and Mesopotamia by
Theban wardens of the Egyptiac World’s southern marches whose latent
militarism had been aroused by the Asian barbarians’ impact. But the
drama which had opened with the Hyksos’ unprovoked assault on the
Egyptiac Society, and had found its denouement in this effective Egyptiac
counter-stroke and in the consequent encounters between an Egyptiac
Society that had thus been galvanized into new life and the Hittite and
Babylonic successors of the Sumeric Society, might have been expected
thereafter to peter out, without having sown fresh dragon-tooth seeds of
karma, when ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt fell into decay and was overrun
in its turn by barbarian invaders. At this juncture, however, History re¬
peated itself; for the Aramaic invaders of a dissolving Egyptiac New
Empire’s domain in Syria swept on into Mesopotamia and surged up
against Assyria, as the previous Hyksos invaders of a dissolving Egyptiac
Middle Empire’s Asian domain had swept on into the Nile Valley
and surged up against the Thebaid; and this recurrence of an untoward
constellation of historical circumstances generated a concatenation of
encounters by begetting a second tragedy in which the motif of the
preceding drama reproduced itself on a larger scale and with greater
violence.

The backwash from a barbarian flood that had been engulfing the
domain of a neighbouring society infuriated the Assyrian wardens of the
Babylonic World’s northern marches as it had infuriated the Theban
wardens of the southern marches of the Egyptiac World ; z and on this
occasion, as on that, the sins of barbarian aggressors who had aroused so
formidable a latent force were not visited solely on the heads of these
aggressors’ children; for the Assyrian militarists who had been goaded into
counter-aggression by a provocative challenge from outlying Aramaean
members of a nascent Syriac Society fell upon all their neighbours in¬
discriminately, without sparing cither the unoffending members of the
Syriac Society west of the Euphrates or the surviving fragments of
an already shattered Hittite Society astride the Taurus or even their

1 See I. i. 105; p. 448, above, and the Note on Chronology in vol. x, pp. 197-208.

a See II. ii. 133-5. ">d PP- 439 “ 4 °. above.

462 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
own kinsmen in the interior of a Babylonic World of which the Assyrian
marchmen themselves were members and which it was their historic
mission not to attack but to defend.

It will be seen that this ‘Hyksos-Aramaean’ or ‘Theban-Assyrian’
concatenation of two encounters overlapped in the Time-dimension
with the Herodotean concatenation whose fourth link was still in
process of being forged in the twentieth century of the Christian Era;
and, though the two chains cannot be reduced to a single series, they
also cannot be wholly disentangled from one another.

In the first of the four successive tragedies in the Herodotean tetralogy
the outcome of a drama that had the Western Mediterranean Basin for
its theatre was influenced, as we have noticed, 1 by the course of a con¬
temporary drama, performed in the South-West Asian ‘Fertile Crescent’,
which was the second of the two tragedies in the Theban-Assyrian series.
The furor Assyrianis first undesignedly handicapped the Phoenicians
and Tyrrhenians in their maritime competition with the Hellenes by
harrying their continental homelands in the Levant, and then likewise
undesignedly helped them to retrieve their position in the Mediter¬
ranean vis-a-vis the Hellenes by preparing the ground in South-West
Asia and Egypt for the rapid establishment of an Achaemenian Empire
that was to give the Syrophoenicians a powerful backing. The Assyrians
had made the Achaemenian Empire’s fortune, before the Achaemcnidae
had been heard of, by provoking the consolidation of a Median successor-
state whose Assyrian spoils Cyrus the Achacmcnid took over, and they
had also facilitated the Achaemenian empire-builders’ subsequent task
by breaking, for their benefit, the spirit of the peoples of South-West
Asia and Egypt.

Thereafter, this Assyro-Persian second link in a Theban-Assyrian
chain became inseparably intertwined with the Pcrso-Macedonian
second link in the Herodotean chain; for the encounters with the Baby-
Ionic Civilization that had been forced upon its Hittite, Syriac, and
Egyptiac neighbours by successive explosions of Assyrian militarism in
the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries b.c. had brought the Assyrians’
victims into intimate relations with one another as well as with the
Babylonic World; and this fusion of divers cultures that had been a by¬
product of the furor Assyriacus was extended and intensified when the
impact of Hellenic militarism in and after the generation of Alexander
the Great brought the Indie and the Sinic Society into contact both
with Hellenism and with the four societies that had already been broken
up by an Assyrian hammer and thrown together into an Achaemenian
melting-pot. In the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic and Oriental
history the progressive penetration of the Babylonic, Hittite, and
Egyptiac societies by the Syriac culture, which had been taking place
first under Assyrian assault and battery and latterly under an Achae¬
menian aegis, was overtaken and challenged by the ubiquitous radiation
of the Hellenic culture in the train of Macedonian and Roman conquista-
dores. For a thousand years, running from Alexander’s passage of the
Dardanelles to the final liquidation of an Alexander’s and a Scipio’s
1 On pp. 42: and 424-6. above.

CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS 463
work by the Primitive Muslim Arabs, the Syriac and Hellenic Civiliza¬
tions were competing for the conversion of Babylonic, Hittite, and
Egyptiac souls; 1 and this competition, which was one of the major in¬
cidents in both Syriac and Hellenic history, is a common episode in
which our two concatenations of encounters are inseparably implicated
with one another.

If Herodotus had happened to be born into the post-Alexandrine in¬
stead of the pre-Alexandrinc Age of Hellenic history, his unrivalled

E tius for finding a clue to the tangled skein which is every oecumenical
torian’s raw material would assuredly have led him to take this post-
Alexandrinc Kulturkampf, in preference to a pre-Alexandrine military
conflict between the Achaemenian Empire and the city-states of Euro¬
pean Greece, as the point of departure for his own reconstruction of a
history of Mankind which presented itself to his eyes as a concatenation
of encounters between the divers civilizations in which the Spirit of
Man had expressed itself. And indeed this brilliant Hellenic discoverer
of the historical phenomenon of concatenations could have found no
better vantage-point if the chance that so capriciously allots the time
and place of each individual's birth had condemned Herodotus to be
born into a twentieth-century Western World; for, in the perspective of
an observer posted in that society in that age, the story of the post-
Alcxandrinc competition between the Syriac culture and Hellenism for
the conversion of souls still manifested itself to be the stem from which
all living branches of human history had ramified.

A Hellenism which in the fourth century b.c. had launched out on a
new career of expansion had not passed away till it had made an impact
on every other living civilization in the Old World; one response to the
challenge of these impacts had been the epiphany of the higher religions;
these higher religions had served as chrysalises from which all the old-
world civilizations of the third generation had emerged; and one of these
tertiary civilizations, in the modern chapter of its history, had brought
all other living civilizations into contact with one another by spreading
its own tentacles all round the globe. In fact, the histories of all the
higher religions and all the civilizations except the Mayan and the
Sumcric and the Indus Culture and the Shang Culture could have been
housed by an imaginary twentieth-century Herodotus in the authentic
Herodotus's capacious house of many mansions; and, in taking a con¬
catenation of encounters as the ground plan for his masterpiece of
literary architecture, Herodotus was showing a penetrating insight into
the structure of an oecumenical historian’s subject-matter; for these
encounters between societies that are one another’s contemporaries arc
evidently extremely prehensile; they readily interlock; and the two
intertwined concatenations that we have traced out have proved to em¬
brace, between them, the greater part of post-primitive human history
down, not merely to the fifth century b.c., but to the twentieth century
of the Christian Era.

Sec pp. 442-6, above.

464 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

(II) ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS

( a) AGENTS AND REAGENTS

Our survey of encounters between civilizations that are one another’s
contemporaries, and of the concatenations in which these encounters are
apt to interlock, has already brought to light a diversity in the roles
played by the actors in these social dramas. In each play, and indeed in
each act of any one of them, there is a part}' that precipitates the en¬
counter by taking the initiative and there is another party that reacts to
this assault by endeavouring to shake off the ascendancy which the
seizure of the initiative has placed in his assailant’s hands.

It is no doubt conceivable that the original agent’s initiative may be so
disconcerting, or his intrinsic strength, vigour, and efficiency so pre¬
dominant, that the assaulted party may be subjugated or even annihilated
without ever having succeeded in offering any resistance whatsoever.
Within the five or six thousand years during which the species of human
society known as civilizations had been in existence down to the time of
writing, a number of primitive societies had suffered the fate of annihila¬
tion at the hands of representatives of this younger and more potent
variety of their kind ; 1 but examples of this decisively simple outcome of
an encounter between contemporaries would have been hard to find in
instances in which both the parties were civilizations. Societies of this
younger type were insured against a doom to which primitive societies
were prone to succumb by the relatively considerable size of their areas
and populations , 2 in which civilizations even of the lowest physical
calibre far outstripped primitive societies of the largest order of physical
magnitude . 1 The normal fate of the bodies social of civilizations that had
been prostrated by the impact of aggressive contemporaries had been,
not extermination, but subjugation; and the historical evidence showed

1 Sec I. i. 148-9. _ * See ibid.

3 In the post-Columbian history of the New World the comparative density of the
agricultural population in the domains of the Central American and Andean societies
was no doubt one of the reasons why these ‘Indians’ survived the fearful experience of
the Spanish conquest and domination, when the sparse population of hunters in North
America was supplanted by the agricultural colonists who streamed across the Atlantic
to create the United States. It is noteworthy that the north-western outposts of a sub¬
jugated Centra! American Society in New Mexico managed to survive the conquest of
their country by the United States no less successfully than their kinsmen across the
border managed to live on under the regimes of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and its
successor-state the Republic of Mexico. Even the culturally more backward agricultural
peoples of Southern Appalachia survived the ordeal of being deported from their homes
in the south-eastern section of the United States and being deposited in reservations
beyond the Mississippi which were eventually engulfed in the State of Oklahoma (see
p. 36, n. I, above).

At the same time, the survival of the scions of the Andean and Central American
civilizations and the disappearance of the primitive societies of North America cannot
be accounted for wholly by the differences between these peoples of the New World,
in the mntter of their comparative levels of culture and comparative densities of popula¬
tion, at the time of their subjugation by their conquerors from the other side of the
Atlantic. We have already noticed in another context (in II. i. 211-27) that there was
an historic difference between the respective attitudes of the Catholic and the Protestant
conquerors of the ‘Indians’ towards their victims. The victims of the Protestant con¬
querors had the misfortune to be reckoned as ‘Natives’ by a New Israel whose pre¬
occupation with the historical books of the Old Testament had infected them with a
race-feeling that remained foreign to the outlook of the Castilian successors of the Cid
and Sortonus—cruel and rapacious though these conquistadorei were.

ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 465
that it would be rash to assume, in any instance in which both parties
were still alive, that the subjugation of one of them by the other was the
end of the story, however desperate the subjugated party’s initial dis¬
comfiture and discouragement.

A striking example of a subjugation that had every appearance of being
definitive was the prostration of the Mexic and Andean societies after
the military overthrow of the Aztec and Inca Powers by the Castilian
pioneers of one of the civilizations of the Old World. 1 Yet the judge¬
ment; hazarded in an earlier passage of this Study, 1 that these two sub¬
jugated civilizations of the New World might be considered to have been
completely incorporated into the Western Christian body social by the
time of writing, might have to be suspended in the light of the surpris¬
ingly different denouement that had eventually declared itself in certain
comparable cases.

An Arabic Muslim Civilization which had been swallowed up by an
Iranic Muslim Civilization in the sixteenth century of the Christian Era
had unexpectedly re-emerged in the nineteenth century, after a three-
hundred-years-long living death in the belly of the whale, 3 to reassert
itself by taking an individual path of its own towards the goal of Westerni¬
zation. The Oriental societies that had lain inert for more than a hundred
years, after their Achaemenian house of many mansions had suddenly
been brought tumbling about their ears by the blast of an apparently
superhuman Alexander’s thunderbolt, had lived on to give a counter¬
shock to their Hellenic conquerors by proving after all to have been, not
permanently paralysed, but merely temporarily stunned; and this trick,
that was played on the Ptolemies by their Egyptiac subjects and on the
Seleucidae by the Jews at and after the turn of the third and second
centuries B.C., was likewise played on British rulers of India in the
twentieth century of the Christian Era by Indian subjects whose nine¬
teenth-century acquiescence in a British RSj was proved by their twen¬
tieth-century reaction against the same British regime to have been no
more than a temporary psychological effect of eighteenth-century
political and social tribulations. On the evidence of these three other
cases it would have been more prudent in the Central American case to
refrain from pre-judging the question whether the Mexican Revolution
of a.d. 1910 would prove in the event to have inaugurated the last stage
in the Westernization of a subjugated Central American Civilization or
the first stage in a reaction of the submerged society which—to judge by
the history' of the Oriental reactions to the impact of a post-Alexandrine
Hellenism—might be none the less vigorous and effective in the long
run for having been so long delayed owing to the severity of the shock
that had been administered four hundred years before by an alien
aggressor’s sudden stunning blow.

The truth would appear to be that Life, so long as even a spark of it
survives, is irreconcilable with permanent passivity; and on this showing
we may expect that there will always be more than one act in the drama
of any encounter between societies in which both parties are civilizations,

« See IV. iv. 79-81 end V. v. 90-93.

* In IV. iv. 81.

J See IV. iv. 113-14-

466 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

and in which the party that suffers assault will therefore ex hypothesi
have been proof against the conclusive fate of annihilation. Even when
the assaulted party’s life has been reduced by the severity of its experi¬
ence to a state of ‘living death’, the original act of aggression by which
the encounter has been precipitated will stimulate the victim to react in
some way sooner or later. In terms that have become familiar in this
Study, an encounter between civilizations that are one another’s con¬
temporaries may be described as being one terrestrial manifestation of
the cosmic action of Challenge-and-Response ; 1 and the particular res¬
ponse which this particular challenge evokes will bring into play the
dramatic motif of peripeteia or 'the reversal of roles , 2 since the reaction,
however feeble it may be, will, as far as it goes, be an endeavour on the
victim’s part to wrest the initiative out of the assailant’s hands.

These terms ‘assailant’ and ‘victim’ are not very happily chosen; for,
while they have the practical merit of conveying the diversity in the
character of the roles in the drama of an encounter between contempor¬
aries, they import a connotation of violence, wickedness, and suffering
which are not inherent in this dramatic situation, however few of the
encounters known to History might in fact have been entirely gentle,
innocent, and innocuous. However that may be, the ethically colourless
terms ‘agent’ and ‘reagent’ seem preferable to the prejudicial terms
‘assailant’ and ‘victim’ for designating two characters in our drama for
which we need to find distinctive names in order to bring out the dis¬
tinction between the parts which these characters play. Now that we
have identified the roles and have labelled the characters, we can go on
to survey the principal alternative possible types of reaction and the
principal alternative possible denouements in encounters of this kind.

( b ) ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE REACTIONS

In surveying the alternative types of reaction it may be convenient to
begin with those that are retorts in kind to the action by which they
have been evoked, and to pass the rest in review in an ascending order
of the degree of their difference in character from the challenges to
which they are responses.

The most conspicuous form of a retort in kind is a reply to force by
force which is one of the commonest of the motifs that have presented
themselves in our survey of historic encounters . 3

For example, the Hindu and Orthodox Christian victims of aggressive
Iranic Muslim militarism retorted by turning militant themselves and
showing their teeth to their oppressors. This was the Sikhs’ and the
MarSthSs’ retort to the Mughals and the hajduks’ and the klcphts’
retort 4 to the 'Osmanlis. Even a moribund Syriac World and its nascent
Arabic successor summoned up the military spirit to evict the Crusaders
from all except their Andalusian and Sicilian conquests at the expense of
Dar-al-Islam; and the apparently unwarlike Greek Orthodox Christians
were stung by the outrage of the Fourth Crusade into embarking on the

* See II. i. 271-99- . 2 See IV. iv. 245-61-

* On pp. 106-453, possim, above, where some account will be found of all the

episodes cited below in the present chapter. * Sec V. v. 296-302.

ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 467
perilous adventure of a resistance movement which succeeded in recap¬
turing Constantinople from the Frankish usurpers within fifty-seven
years of the date of their seizure of the Imperial City, and in evicting
them from their last foothold in the Morea before the Moreot Greeks
forfeited to the 'Osmanlis the liberty that they had recovered from the
Franks by the strength of their own right arms.

In an encounter between the Hellenes and their Oriental contempor¬
aries, the Arsacidac, the Sasanidae, and the Primitive Muslim Arabs in
turn successfully ventured to try conclusions with a Macedonian military
machine that had won a reputation for invincibility by overthrowing the
Achaemenian Empire and with a Roman military machine that had
captured this reputation from the Macedonians by overthrowing Mace-
don itself. The Modern Western Powers retorted effectively to their long-
victorious Ottoman assailants’ superiority in military technique by
mastering the tricks of their adversaries’ trade; and Russian autocrats
twice over made the same retort to technologically superior Modern
Western militarists. A Muscovy that had all but succumbed to Polish
aggression in the seventeenth century succeeded in foiling Swedish
aggression in the eighteenth century and French aggression in the nine¬
teenth century thanks to Peter the Great’s effective adoption of the
Modern Western military technique of the day; and a post-Petrine
Russia that had collapsed in the World War of a.d. 1914-18 under the
impact of a German war-machine driven by the power of twentieth-
century Western Industrialism succeeded in triumphantly repelling a
second and more formidable German attack in the World War of a.d.

1939-45 thanks to Stalin’s effective industrialization of the Soviet Union
during an inter-war breathing-space.

Between the date of the military collapse of Germany in a.d. 1945 and
the moment in the autumn of a.d. 1949 when these lines were written,
Russia was believed by Western observers to have made a third retort in
kind to a third challenge from the West in the same field of technological
warfare by mastering the ‘know-how’ of manufacturing an atomic bomb
which had been discovered in the United States in time for use in a.d.
1945 in dealing a ‘knock-out blow’ to Japan. The Japanese had com¬
mitted the folly of courting destruction by wantonly attacking the
United States in a.d. 1941 because they had grossly overestimated their
own relative military strength; this inept miscalculation was the nemesis
of deceptively facile Japanese victories over technologically backward
Russian and Chinese opponents in the course of the preceding fifty years;
and these victories had been rewards for the shrewdness of Japanese
Elder Statesmen when they had met a challenge of Western military
superiority in the third quarter of the nineteenth century by a response
which had shot ahead of Peter the Great’s and had anticipated Stalin’s.

Such illustrations of retorts in kind on the military plane are the tradi¬
tional classic examples of this rather unimaginative type of response to
the challenge of an encounter; but on closer examination some of these
cases prove to be not quite the strict observances of the lex talionis that
at first sight they might seem to be.

The Modern Western Powers, for example, did not simply take the

468 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Ottoman art of war as they found it; they proceeded to make notable
improvements on it at the very time when the ’Osmanlis themselves
were losing their grip on an instrument that had been of their own in¬
vention. 1 The 'Osmanlis had achieved their previous victories over the
Westerners and the Mamluks, and the Mamluks their own previous
victories over the Westerners and the Mongols, not just by pitting pug¬
nacity against pugnacity, but by bringing a creative faculty into action
against opponents who had lapsed into resting on their oars. The Mam¬
luks had worsted the Western cataphracts and the Eurasian horse-
archers by creating a cavalry that was both heavy-armed and disciplined, 2
and the 'Osmanlis had worsted the Mamluks by out-trumping a dis¬
ciplined cavalry with the new weapon of a disciplined infantry. 3 The
horse-archer and the cataphract were thus eventually driven off the field
by Mamluk and Ottoman war-machines which triumphed over them in
virtue of being not simply retorts in kind but in some sense new devices
of superior efficacy; and the two thenceforth obsolete types of cavalry
that had held the field for so many centuries had originally won their
entry into it as likewise new’ and likewise superior inventions in virtue of
which the Arsacidac had managed to defeat a disciplined infantry of the
Macedonian and Roman schools. 4

A Communist Russia, too, was not content simply to master the
military technique of a Germany and a United States who were her
successive Western enemies. While with one hand she was retorting in
kind to Germany by harnessing Industrialism to War and retorting in
kind to the United States by equipping herself with atomic weapons,
her other hand was busy all the time with the creation of a new form of
warfare in which the old-fashioned method of fighting by physical force
of arms was to be replaced by a spiritual combat in which the battlefield
would be the Psyche, the troops would be emotions and ideas, and the
master weapon would be a propaganda inspired by an ‘ideology’ whose
captivating power might prove more potent for the achievement of war-
aims than even the explosive power of a bomb charged with devastat-
ingly fissile matter.

In inventing ‘the cold war’ the Russians might prove to have succeeded
in wresting at last out of Western hands an initiative which the West had
won and maintained in a perennial competition with Russia on the
military plane by first adopting an Ottoman military technique and then
improving this borrowed art out of all recognition by enlisting in its
service an Industrial Revolution and a mastery of atomic energy. It was
true that ‘the cold war’ was not created by the Russians ex nihilo , but,
like every other human invention, was partly inspired by one of Man¬
kind’s previous achievements. The instrument of propaganda, which
Communism brought into action as a new weapon in the arena of mun¬
dane power politics, had first been fashioned by the missionaries of the
higher religions for the more ctherial purpose of converting souls. In
any deconsecrated society—post-Christian, post-Muslim, or post-Ma-
hayanian—this once religious art was at Homo Obcaecatus 's disposal for

1 See III. iii. 46-47.

2 Sec IV. iv. 447-50.

ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 469

baser uses; and Homo Obcaecatus Occidentals had actually anticipated
Homo Obcaecatus Russicus in thus bringing propaganda down to earth.
A Modern Western society of shopkeepers had turned the religious art
of propaganda to account for the commercial advertisement of a mech¬
anized industry’s wares; but it had been left by the Modern Westerners
to their Russian contemporaries to hit upon the new idea of applying the
missionary’s methods of influencing his public to the mischievous busi¬
ness of politics instead of to the sordid business of economics; and, when
thus suddenly faced with a systematically propagated Communist ‘ideo¬
logy’, the West found itself momentarily at a loss for a reply.

While the Communist propaganda could hardly improve on the
practice of contemporary Western commercial advertising in the lavish¬
ness of its outlay or in the painstakingness of its ‘market research’, it did
show itself capable of reawakening a long dormant enthusiasm in spirit¬
ually starved post-Christian Western souls that were so hungry for the
bread without which Man shall not live that they recklessly swallowed
the word which Communism gave them, without pausing to ask whether
this was God’s* word or Antichrist’s. The Marxian Gospel was able to
evoke this enthusiastic response because it speciously professed to offer
to Man a matchless opportunity for satisfying a desire which was the
deepest and noblest motive in Human Nature. Man is spiritually frus¬
trated if he cannot invest his petty transient personal life with abiding
spiritual significance by devoting it to some cause that manifestly trans¬
cends it in spiritual value; and Communism proffered to Man an objec¬
tive that might seem worthier than any that had been visible on his
mental horizon since the latter-day eclipse of Christianity. Communism
called upon post-Christian Man to cure himself of a childish nostalgia for
a justly discredited otherworldly utopia by transferring his allegiance
from a non-existent God to a very present Human Race to whose service
he could devote all his adult powers by working for the attainment of an
Earthly Paradise. In an oecumenical struggle between a Communist
Russia and a secularized Modem Western Society for the allegiance of
the rest of Mankind the apologists for a dampingly prosaic secular
Modern Western way of life might find themselves hard put to it to ‘sell’
their unconvincing apotheosis of the self-interested individual human
being in competition with this captivating Communist cult of the
colossal idol of Collective Humanity.

It is evident that, in inventing a post-Christian ‘ideological’ warfare
as a reply to a post-Christian warfare waged by physical force, a Com¬
munist Russia had crossed the indeterminate borderline between a retort
in kind and a retort which was telling in virtue of its difference in
character from the challenge to which it was a response. 'The cold war’
was a response on the plane of propaganda to a challenge on the plane of
physical armaments, and this was not the first response on a non-military
plane that the old-fashioned military challenge had ever evoked.

In an encounter between a Syriac and a pre-Alexandrine Hellenic
Society we have already seen the Phoenicians make an effective non¬
military retort to the military aggression of an expanding Hellenic World

« Matt. iv. 4; Luke iv. 4.

47 © ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
that had enjoyed the two decisive military advantages of holding the
interior lines and commanding a superiority in numbers. The hard-
pressed Phoenicians had saved themselves from military disaster by re¬
sorting to the non-military counter-measure of political combination on
a grand scale, and we have observed that this Phoenician manoeuvre of
changing the ground of competition proved effective because the Hel¬
lenes were unable or unwilling to emulate the Phoenicians’ statesman¬
like moves on the new ground on to which they had been drawn by the
Phoenicians’ counter-initiative. While the sixth-century Libyphocnician
city-states purchased security by acquiescing in the hegemony of Carth¬
age, and the sixth-century Syrophocnician city-states by acquiescing in
the hegemony of the Achacmenidae, the contemporary Hellenic city-
states forfeited their previous military ascendancy over their Phoenician
rivals by failing to bring themselves, for their part, to pay the inexorable
price of a political union that was now the key to strength on the new
terms of competition which the Phoenicians’ initiative had set.

A similarly effective political response to a military challenge was
made by Russian Orthodox Christendom after the Tatars’ facile sub¬
jugation of a House of Rurik which had fallen a prey to these Eurasian
Nomad aggressors largely because it had been divided against itself."
How were the subjugated Russians ever to shake off the yoke of a steppe-
empire which commanded all the Nomad military man-power of the
great open spaces between Russia and Khwarizm ? Their only hope of
liberation lay in achieving a concentration of Russian political power
that would be a match for the military power of Juji’s enormous province
of Chingis Khan’s universal state; and this retort to a challenge on one
plane by a response on another was duly accomplished by a line of
Muscovite empire-builders who were so grimly intent on their patriotic
purpose that they did not shrink from achieving it at the all but pro¬
hibitive price of bringing the Medusa head of a defunct Byzantine auto¬
cracy out of a chamber of horrors in the museum of Russia’s Orthodox
Christian cultural heritage.

Such retorts on the political plane to assaults on the military plane
may be supplemented by ‘geopolitical’ manoeuvres. After the Phoe¬
nician rivals of the pre-Alexandrine Hellenes had managed to bring their
adversaries’ aggression to a halt by concentrating their own political
forces under the hegemony of two imperial Powers, these Carthaginian
and Achaemenian empires attempted to crush the foiled Hellenic aggres¬
sors by simultaneous enveloping movements. A Russia which had re¬
torted to the aggression of the Tatars by acquiescing in the autocracy of
a Muscovite Third Rome proceeded to turn the northern flank of a
Eurasian Nomad World—and of an Islamic Society which by that time
had incorporated into itself the western half of Chingis Khan’s gigantic
ranch—by carrying her eastern frontier forward from the River Moskva
to the Pacific Ocean; and a simultaneous envelopment of D 3 r-al-Islam
on the south was the contemporary Western World’s retort to an Otto-

* Between a . d . 1055 and a . d . 1228 there had been eighty fratricidal war* in Russia
between rival Rurikid princes (Vernadsky, G.: Kievan Ruisia (New Haven 1948, Yale
University Press), p. 3x6).

ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 471
man frontal attack on Western Christendom in the basins of the Danube
and the Mediterranean.

Both these anti-lslamic encircling movements were executed in a
novel element in which the encircled adversary found himself at a dis¬
advantage. The Cossacks foiled the Nomads by learning how to thread
their way through woods, which these steppe-rangers dared not enter,
along waterways that the Nomads had learnt to cross but not to navigate . 1
The Portuguese out-trumped 'Osmanlis who in Mediterranean waters,
as well as on continental ground, had established a military ascendancy
over their Western Christian adversaries. The Portuguese wrested from
Nature the secret of how to navigate an Ocean that had hitherto success¬
fully defied Man's efforts to master it ; 2 and, in thus shifting the ground
of the competition between the Islamic World and the West from the
field of military armaments and tactics on land and on land-locked seas
t° the field of oceanic ship-building 1 and seamanship, they snatched the
initiative out of Ottoman hands. An Ottoman navy that knew how to
meet its Western opponents on equal terms in the Mediterranean found
itself swept off the Indian Ocean by ocean-faring Westerners whose
mastery of their own clement decisively tipped the scales against the
'Osmanlis' geopolitical advantage of here holding the interior lines . 4

« The exception that hud proved the rule of the Eurasian Nomads’ unenterprising
indifference to the possibility of utilizing rivers as means of communication had been
the use made of the waterways of the Indus and its tributaries in the second and the last
century b.c. by Saka conquerors of a Bactrian Greek Empire who had perhaps first
taken to the water in their previous haunts along the banks of the Middle Oxus and the
Lower Jaxarfes (t» V. v. 603).

* The ultimate failure of the Scandinavians to bring the New World into continuous
communication with the Old World by a North Atlantic route which they had come
within an ace of opening up has been noticed in II. ii. 438-43.

J The swiftness of the evolution of an ocean-worthy type of ship on the Atlantic sea¬
board of Western Christendom in the fifteenth century of the Christian Era is discussed
in XI. ix. 364-8.

4 The Portuguese achievement of learning how to navigate the Ocean was, of course,
not merely a decisive event in an encounter between the West and the Islamic World;
it was an epoch-making event in human history, because it made Man master of n
medium of communication that was sufficiently conductive, and near enough to being
ubiquitous, to knit the entire habitable surface of the planet together into a home for an
oecumenical society embracing the whole of Mankind. At the time of writing in the first
century of a post-Modem Age of Western history, the social unification of the World
which had been brought about by the Portuguese invention of an ocean-faring sailing-
ship had found new instruments in the aeroplane and the broadcasting station; but,
however high the latter-day conquests of the ether and the air might rank in the honours’
list of scientific inventions, it was manifest that they could not compare with the con-

C st of the Ocean in point of social importance. As means to the social end of knitting
whole of Mankind into a single society, aerial navigation and wireless communica¬
tion merely served to draw closer a world-encompassing net which Man’s conquest of
the Ocean had long since flung round the globe. The decisive step in the unification of
the World had been the invention of the type of ocean-going sailing-vessel that came to
be known as 'the ship’ par txcellentr, and Henry the Navigator and his companions had
not only required no successors; they had also had no predecessors; for the enduring
unification of the whole surface of the globe, which was the fruit of their work, was a
social achievement whose consequences in its own sphere differed in a degree that
virtually amounted to a difference in kind from the effects of the fitful inter-communica¬
tion between the civilizations of the Old World that had resulted in earlier ages from the
achievements of Minoan pioneers in the navigation of inland seas and of Nomad
pioneers in the taming of horses. A discussion of the historical significance of the replace¬
ment of Babur’s steppe-ranging horse by da Gama’s ocean-faring ship as the sovereign
instrument of human intercourse, at and after the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries of the Christian Era, will be found in Toynbee, A. J.: Civilization on Trial
(London 1948, Cumbcrlegc), pp. 62-96: 'The Unification of the World and the Change
in Historical Perspective’.

472 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

The Modem Western Christian mariners who thus foiled the Ottoman
militarists by taking to the Ocean did not entirely break away from the
modus operandi of the adversaries to whom they were making their novel
retort; for, though commerce was the principal quest of the new-fangled
Portuguese ocean-faring ships, and though the Manchester School of nine¬
teenth-century English political philosophy may not have been altoget her
mistaken in idealizing commerce as the beneficently pacific world-unify¬
ing activity of Modern Western Man , 1 the progeny of the Crusaders had
not undergone so miraculous a change of heart as to have become proof
against the temptation of running their predatory ancestral pursuits of
piracy and empire-building in double harness with the respectably law¬
ful occasions of their ocean voyages. A less dubious example of a pacific
encircling movement in reply to a military frontal attack is the encircle¬
ment of the Babylonic World by the Syriac Society in the Achaemenian
Age as a result of a cultural conversion of Iranian barbarians who had
become the rulers of a universal state.

The missionaries of the Syriac culture who had thus defeated their
Babylonic conquerors in a competition for the captivation of Iranian
souls had not made the long overland trek from ‘the Land beyond the
River' to the lands beyond the Zagros as military or even as merchant
adventurers; they were ‘displaced persons’ who had been deported by
Assyrian and Babylonian war-lords with the object of making it once for
all impossible for them to re-establish their beloved Israel’s or Judah's
shattered military and political power; and their conquerors’ calculation
had proved correct as far as it had gone; for neither the Assyrian nor the
Neo-Babylonian imperial regime had ever been challenged thereafter by
any armed uprising of these deportees. The reaction by which the Baby¬
lonic militarists’ Syriac victims eventually wrested the initiative out of
their oppressors’ hands had been quite beyond the oppressors’ purview
because it was on a wholly non-military plane. The oppressors had so
utterly failed to reckon with the possibility of any retort on the cultural
plane from victims whom they were effectively rendering militarily and
politically impotent that with their own hands they had planted them in
a cultural mission-field which these exiles would never have visited if
they had not been posted there by force against their will.

In thus exerting itself to impress its cultural influence on the Gentiles
among whom it had been scattered abroad, a Syriac diaspork in 'the
cities of the Mcdcs ’ 1 and in Babylonia was being moved by a concern to
preserve a communal identity that the oppressor had intended to destroy
by uprooting these deportees from their national home. In the histories
of the Jewish and other dtracints , the same concern for self-preservation
in partibus peregtinorum was, however, more apt to express itself in the
antithetical policy of self-isolation, since a scattered and physically im¬
potent minority might more reasonably hope for success in the limited
task of defending its own cultural heritage against contamination through
the influence of the surrounding Gentile majority than in the ambitiously
offensive-defensive cultural strategy of seeking to ensure its own sur-

1 Sec IV. iv. 181-4 for a critique of the Manchester School's outlook.

* 2 Kings xvii. 6 and xviii. 11.

ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 473
yival by converting an alien majority to the minority’s peculiar way of
life. Self-isolation in reply to molestation is another variety of the type of
reaction that operates on a different plane from the action to which it is
a rejoinder; and this policy of ‘isolationism’ presents itself in its simplest
form when it is practised, not as a tour de force by a diaspork without a
home of its own, but as a line of least resistance by a society whose
habitat happens to be a physical fastness.

An insular Japanese Society, that was eventually to be driven into res¬
ponding by a compromising retort in kind to the irresistible importunity
of an industrialized nineteenth-century Western Civilization, had once
successfully met the less potent impact of a pre-industrial West by
insulating itself within the then still effective natural frontiers of its coast¬
line; and this retort of physical self-isolation which a seventeenth-
century Japan was able to make to Portuguese intruders on the strength
of her insularity was made to the same unwelcome strangers by a con¬
temporary Abyssinia 1 on the strength of her precipitous canons and her
impregnable ambas. The lesser highland fastnesses of Sasun and the
Tur-'Abdin enabled a Gregorian Armenian and a Jacobite Syrian frag¬
ment of the same Monophysite fossil of an extinct Syriac Society to have
recourse to the same policy; 1 and a plateau of Tibet which dwarfed the
plateau of Abyssinia provided an all but inaccessible highland fastness
for a Tantric Mahayanian fossil of an extinct Indie Society; 3 but none of
these resorts to a physical isolationism that was Man’s occasional un¬
earned increment from Nature’s geographical caprice could compare in
historical interest and importance with the psychological isolationism
which was a diaspora’s retort to the same challenge of a threat to its sur¬
vival ; for a diaspora had to face this threat in geographical circumstances
in which, so far from being peculiarly sheltered by some natural rampart
or some natural moat, it was peculiarly at the mercy of its neighbours
through having been artificially deprived of the home of its own which
had been a normal community’s patrimony.

While isolationism of either the physical or the psychological type is
a conspicuous instance of a retort that is dissimilar in character to the
act of aggression which has provoked it, this elusive retort to molestation
is a strictly negative way of seeking to capture the initiative by carrying
the encounter on to new ground; and, wherever this negative reaction
has met with any measure of success, it will usually be found to have
been accompanied by other reactions which have likewise differed in
kind from the original act of aggression but which have been, in them¬
selves, of a positive order. In the life of a diaspora its psychological
self-isolation from the surrounding Gentile majority would be psycholo¬
gically intolerable if this daily ordeal were not felt to be a necessary negative
means to the supremely desirable positive end of safeguarding a precious
cultural heritage; and an obstinately peculiar people that was militarily
and politically at the surrounding majority’s mercy would also be unable
to hold its own in the pursuit of this aim of cultural survival if it did not
at the same time develop on the economic plane a special efficiency in
the exploitation of such economic opportunities as had been left open to

« Sec II. ii. 365-7. * See II. ii. 258. J See II. ii. 405. n. 1.

474 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
it by the surrounding majority’s inadvertence. An almost uncanny apti¬
tude for economic specialization and a meticulous observance of jots and
tittles of a traditional law are indeed a diaspora’s two main positive
devices for providing itself with artificial substitutes for the loaves and
fishes and the lares et penates that are the natural birthright of un¬
uprooted communities. 1

The device of economic specialization, which is one element in a
diaspora’s response to the supreme challenge of having been uprooted
from its home, may also be hit upon by an unuprooted society that has
not been deprived of its home but has merely been debarred from con¬
tinuing to enlarge its bounds. In other contexts 1 we have noticed how,
when the Hellenes were prevented by the establishment of the Cartha¬
ginian and Achacmcnian empires from continuing to provide for an
increasing population by enlarging the geographical domain of a tradi¬
tional subsistence economy, they responded by developing a new-fangled
economy of specialized production for export, in exchange for imported
food-supplies, that enabled them to find a livelihood for a larger popula¬
tion within now' stationary geographical limits.

The device of replying to force by a retort on the cultural plane,
which is the second string to a diaspora’s bow, has likewise also been
practised by societies that have been hard hit by the impact of an alien
Power without having been reduced to a diaspora’s desperate straits.
The Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh of the 'Osmanlis and the Hindu ra'iyeh
of the Mughals both alike succeeded in turning the tables on these
victorious men of the sword by a militarily impotent penman’s intel¬
lectual counter-stroke. The Muslim conquerors of India and Orthodox
Christendom allowed the mirage of their own past military triumphs to
keep them blinded to the realities of a subsequent chapter of history in
which their kingdom was being divided and given to the Franks, till
their dethronement by these new amphibious lords of Sea and Land was
already an accomplished fact. The ra'iyeh, whose one surviving weapon
was the nimbleness of their wits, foresaw the coming triumph of the
West in time once again to adapt themselves to a new order. A mental
flexibility that they had once displayed in mastering the arts of their
Turkish conquerors’ Islamic Civilization now served them equally well
in another timely transfer of their cultural allegiance. This manoeuvre of
the Brahmans and the Phanariots—which might be described as a
‘mental encirclement’ to distinguish it from the geographical encircle¬
ment of the same slumbering Islamic World by Portuguese mariners and
Cossack backwoodsmen—was a far more effective retort to a Mughal
and an Ottoman military domination than the unimaginative reply to
force with force which was made by the MarSthas and the klcphts.

A Chiot and Bengali intelligentsia’s virtuosity in taking the cultural
impress of successive alien ascendancies was, on the other hand, a less
telling retort to a military conqueror than a Syriac diaspora’s feat of
impressing its own culture on the Medes and Persians. This Syriac
cultural feat of assimilating politically dominant barbarians was emu-

' See II. ii. 208-50, and pp. 272-313, above.

* In I. i. 24-26; III. iii. 139-40 and 197; and pp. 429-30, above.

ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 4 75
lated by the main body of the Far Eastern Society when it successively
assimilated the Khitan, the Kin, and the Manchus; but the Far Eastern
culture failed to work the same magic with Mongol barbarians whose
barbarism had been fortified with a tincture of the Far Western Christ¬
ian culture before they had crossed the Great Wall; and the Far
Eastern Civilization had never, down to the time of writing, achieved
any cultural conquest at all comparable to the Syriac Society’s culminat¬
ing cultural achievement of eventually assimilating the'entire body
social of a Babylonic Civilization that had originally forced this long-
drawn-out encounter upon Syriac victims of an Assyrian militarism . 1
This cultural revanche for a military conquest which the Syriac Civiliza¬
tion consummated at a far advanced stage of its own decline and fall
was perhaps not, however, so extraordinary a triumph as a posthumous

S acific retort to a belated Syriac coup de force that was made by the
yriac Society’s perennial rival, Hellenism. After a moribund Hellenic
Society had received its death-blow from Primitive Muslim Arab con¬
querors who had swept away the last vestiges of Roman rule over right¬
fully Syriac territory, Hellenism retorted, as we have seen, in the
'Abbasid Age, by winning an entry for Hellenic philosophy and science
into a society that had previously shown itself indifferent to all facets of
the Hellenic culture. This posthumous radiation of an abstract of Hel¬
lenism produced an afterglow of Hellenic intellectual activity in an
Arabic medium that was as brilliant as the colours cast upon a cloud-
banked eastern sky by a sun whose disk has already disappeared from
view below a darkening western horizon.

All these non-violent responses to the challenge of force that have so
far been passed in review are, of course, eclipsed by the supremely
pacific and at the same time supremely positive response of creating a
higher religion. The impact of an Hellenic Society on its Oriental con¬
temporaries was answered in this fashion by the epiphany of Cybele-
worship, Isis-worship, Mithraism, Christianity, and the Mahayana in
the bosom of an Hellenic internal proletariat in which the children of
the conquered Oriental societies had been forcibly enrolled. A military
impact of the Babylonic Society on the Syriac evoked the epiphany of
Judaism and Zoroastrianism; and the Turkish conquests of a Hindu and

1 The measure of the difference is given by the survival in China, down to the twen¬
tieth century of the Christian Era, of an Islam that had been introduced in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries by Muslim military colonists in the service of the Mongol
conquerors. These enclaves of Muslim population in China had so far successfully
resisted assimilation, though they were geographically isolated from the main body of
Dar-al-Isldm. One of the secrets of this Chinese Muslim diaspora's success in preserving
its identity was no doubt its tact in falling in with traditional Chinese ways in trivial
matters of external observance which would have been shockingly conspicuous to non-
Chinese Muslim eyes. In the mosque of a Muslim village near Peking which the writer of
this Study visited in December 1929 the Arabic texts on the walls were written vertically,
Chinesc-fashion, instead of being written horizontally from right to left; and the roof-
ridges were bestridden by the same figurines of mock-ferocious guardian genii that would
have been found there if the building had been a Buddhist or a Taoist temple and not
the shrir.e of a religion which banned ‘graven images*. Before the fall of the imperial
regime in China, the Chinese Muslims had even reconciled themselves to honouring
the reigning emperor in the customary Chinese fashion by setting up tablets in his
honour in their places of worship. They had persuaded themselves that this was merely
the outward visible sign of a harmless civil rite, and was not 'the abomination of desola¬
tion’ (see Broomhall, M.: Islam in China (London 1910, Morgan and Scott), p. 1S6).

476 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
an Orthodox Christian world were likewise answered on the religious
plane by the gospels of Nanak and Bcdr-ed-Dln. This religious type of
response, however, carries us beyond the limits of our present inquiry
into the divers ways in which one civilization may respond to a challenge
delivered by another; for, when an encounter between two civilizations
thus gives occasion for a higher religion to make its appearance on the
stage of History, the entry of this new actor signifies the opening of a
fresh play with a different cast and plot.

If, on this account, we leave the epiphanies of higher religions out of
our reckoning in reviewing the alternative possible reactions to an ini¬
tiative taken by one of the characters in a play in which the dramatis
personae are civilizations, we can perhaps arrive at the following con¬
clusions concerning the relative efficacy of divers types of reaction as
alternative methods of wresting the initiative out of the original agent’s
hands. We may conclude that the least effective reply is the retort in
kind, particularly when it is a retort to force by force; that the negative
retort of isolationism is less effective than positive retorts on either the
economic or the cultural plane; and that, of the divers alternative
possible cultural retorts, a pliant receptivity to the culture of a militarily
or politically dominant aggressor is of less avail than the resilient spirit
that turns the tables on the military conqueror by taking him culturally
captive.

( C ) ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE DENOUEMENTS

Among the divers variations on the plot of the drama of an encounter
between contemporaries, the swiftest and simplest denouement is an
outright repulse of the original agent’s attempt to induce or compel the
reagent to become a convert to the agent’s way of life.

This was the outcome of the encounter between the Japanese offshoot
of the Far Eastern Society and the Western Society in its still would-be
Christian 'Early Modern’ phase. After giving the intrusive culture a trial,
the Japanese decided not to allow themselves to be captivated by it, and
they gave effect to their decision by expelling the Portuguese traders,
suppressing the Japanese converts to a post-Tridentine Catholic Western
Christianity, and almost completely insulating Japan from further con¬
tact with the Western World.

This is a classic case of the offer and rejection of an alien culture, be¬
cause the heralds of the Early Modern Western Christian Civilization in
Japan lacked the power to impose their way of life by force or even to
offer any forcible resistance to their forcible repulse by the Japanese
authorities. When a Medieval Western Christian Civilization was re¬
pelled by the Muslims and Orthodox Christians, an Islamic Civilization
by the Orthodox Christians and Hindus, and a Babylonic Civilization by
the Syriac peoples, the reagent who was thus reasserting himself on the
cultural plane was retorting to an assault on the original agent’s part
which had been, not merely violent, but, on the plane of violence,
victorious. The Crusaders, 'Osmanlis, Mughals, Assyrians, and Baby¬
lonians had made their impact as military aggressors, not as merchants
or missionaries; and we have seen that, when the Crusaders’ Medieval

ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 477
Wcstem Christian culture was rejected by Ayyubids and Lascarids, and
the Turkish empire-builders’ Islamic culture by hajduks and klcphts
and Marathas, the rejection took the form of a retort to force by force.
We have also seen that the rejection of the Islamic culture by the Phana-
riots and the Brahmans took the alternative form of a pacific transfer of
cultural allegiance; and that the Syriac victims of Assyrian militarism
triumphantly turned the tables on their conquerors without ever having
it in their power to fight this cultural battle by force of arms.

While these encounters thus display a wide diversity in the matter of
the use of force, they resemble one another in all ending in the same
denouement. An encounter between Japan and the West in which the
Japanese retorted by force to pacific Western overtures, and an en¬
counter between the Syriac Society and the Babylonic World in which
an Assyrian militarism was foiled by its Syriac victims’ ‘non-violent
non-resistance’, both ended alike in the rejection of the intrusive culture
by the party on which it had impinged.

In a case in which the act of rejection had been consummated, whether
by violent or by non-violent measures on the molested society’s part, the
historian would be justified in concluding that the incident was thereby
closed if the societies concerned were extinct by the historian’s own day;
but, if they were then still alive, he would be better advised to keep an
open mind in the light of other passages of history which justified the
proverb that ‘where there is life there is hope’. An Orthodox Christ¬
endom and an Islamic Society that had rejected the Western Civiliza¬
tion in its medieval phase, and a Japanese Society that had subseqjiently

rejected it in its early modern phase, all afterwards fell under its spell
when it offered itself for sale in a deconsecrated form in which a lucrative
technology had been substituted for a redoubtable Christianity as the
pearl of great price which a buyer was invited to acquire. So long as the
parties remained alive, it could never be taken for granted that the re¬
pulse of an agent’s advances was definitive, since History testified that
an apparently conclusive rejection had sometimes been followed by a
sensational volte-face; and the same caution was advisable in regard to
denouements of the antithetical type in which the agent’s advances had
been so successful that they had resulted, to all appearance, in the cul¬
tural conversion of the party to whom they had been addressed; for
History also testified that an acceptance, as well as a rejection, of cul¬
tural overtures might prove not to have been definitive. Here, again, the
historian could not pronounce a confident judgement except in cases
where none of the parties to the encounter was any longer alive.

On this test it could be declared with confidence by a Modern Western
student of History that a long since extinct Syriac Society had definitively
succeeded in assimilating a long since extinct Egyptiac Society by con¬
verting it to the Monophysite variety of Christianity in the fifth and
sixth centuries of the Christian Era and to Islam between the ninth
century and the thirteenth; and there could likewise be no doubt about
an extinct Hellenic Society’s success in assimilating an extinct Hittite
Society’s Etruscan offshoot and Cappadocian main body. A nineteenth-
century Western observer might have felt an equal confidence in reckoning

478 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
as permanent acquisitions of the Western World the territorial gains
that a Medieval Western Christendom had made at Dar-al-IslSm’s and
Orthodox Christendom’s expense in the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and
Southern Italy; but this sanguine Victorian’s twentieth-century epigoni
might be deterred from endorsing their grandfather’s verdict on the out¬
come of an episode in the medieval chapter of Western history by their
own experience of witnessing the reopening of a nineteenth-century
issue on which their grandfather’s verdict would probably have been no
less self-assured. In the nineteenth century of the Christian Era it had
looked as if the main body of Orthodox Christendom had made up its
mind to cast in its lot with the West, and this Orthodox Christian act of
conversion to a secular Modern Western culture seemed to be finally
confirmed when, after the World War of a.d. 1914-18, the Ottoman
Turks decided at last to follow in their former subjects’ footsteps with¬
out hesitations or reservations. Yet, at the very moment when the
Westernization of the Turks, Albanians, Bulgars, Rumans, Serbs, and
Greeks might have been thought to be assured, Russia stepped into the
arena to contest the West’s cultural conquest of an Ottoman Orthodox
Christendom’s former domain by proclaiming there the gospel of Com¬
munism as an alternative ideal to the contemporary Modern Western
way of life.

At the time of writing, it was still impossible for an observer to fore¬
cast the outcome of this Russian attempt in South-Eastern Europe and
Turkey to reverse a process of Westernization that had gone so far as to
have come to appear irrevocable before Russia delivered her challenge.
But an historian could lay his finger on cases in which a similar process of
cultural conversion had in fact been challenged and reversed at a stage at
which it had been at least as far advanced.

In a post-AIexandrine Hellenic World, for instance, the dominance of
Hellenism seemed in the third century b.c. to be as secure as the domin¬
ance of a secular Modern Western culture seemed to be in the nine¬
teenth century of the Christian Era; and on the eve of the first eruption
of fanatical Hellenophobia in Egypt circa 210 b.c. 1 even an intelligent
and perceptive onlooker might have committed himself to the prophecy
that the Hittitc, Syriac, Egyptiac, and Babylonic worlds, which Hellen¬
ism had already subjugated on the political plane, were destined to be
converted to the Hellenic culture no less thoroughly than the Hittite
Society’s already Hcllcnized Etruscan offshoot. Even if our observer
had lived to witness, not only the successive anti-Hellenic outbreaks in
Egypt at the turn of the third and second centuries b.c., but also the
fateful outbreak in Judaea in 166 b.c., he would probably have been less
deeply impressed by these portents of an adverse turn in a cultural tide
that had been flowing previously in Hellenism’s favour than by the
sensational further expansion of the Hellenes’ political dominion in
183 b.c., when Demetrius of Bactria achieved at one lightning stroke an
Hellenic conquest of India that had proved beyond the range of Alex¬
ander the Great.

In this case, however, our acquaintance with the eight-hundred-years-

« Sec V. v. 68.

ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 479
long subsequent course of an encounter between Hellenism and its
Oriental contemporaries informs us that, of all the vast non-Hellcnic
territories—extending eastward from a Phrygian penumbra of Hellas in
Anatolia to the heart of an Indie World in the Jumna-Gangcs Duab—
which had been conquered by Hellenic arms within 150 years of Alex¬
ander’s crossing of the Dardanelles, the only fraction that was Hellenized
irrevocably in the ultimate event was the fragment of a long since
shattered Hittite World that lay to the west of Amanus and Antitaurus.
East of that line, which ran at so short a remove to the east of a
pre-Alexandrine Hellenism’s eastern cultural frontier in the Central
Anatolian Desert, the gospel of Hellenism had been decisively rejected
everywhere before this cultural defeat was clinched in the seventh
century of the Christian Era by the military exploits of the Primitive
Muslim Arabs. The denouement of this long-drawn-out drama was the
tardy and gradual but ultimately complete and conclusive reversal of a
process of Hellenization which had looked irresistible in its heyday.

This dramatic cultural contest between the Hellenic Civilization and
its Oriental contemporaries shared the stage of history with another
drama in which the same dramatis personae were engaged in the unfold¬
ing of a different plot. In the tragedy in which a post-Alcxandrinc Hel¬
lenism was the protagonist the issue was the question whether the
Hellenic culture was to be irrevocably accepted or eventually rejected by
Oriental societies that had been conquered by Hellenic force of arms,
and the denouement was an ultimate expurgation of Hellenism from
non-Hellcnic souls which had seemed for a time to have been decisively
captivated by its charm. In a simultaneously performed mystery play the
dramatic theme was not a contest but was an act of creation, and the
protagonist was a new-born society of a different species from the civili¬
zations of the second generation whose encounter with one another was
the occasion of this protagonist’s epiphany. The denouement of this
other drama was the entry of a higher religion into the World. The
Hellenic Civilization's encounter with the Syriac Civilization gave birth
to Christianity, and its encounter with the Indie Civilization gave birth
to the Mahayana.

The relation between these two plays that were being performed on
one stage simultaneously was an ironical one. From the standpoint of
the tragedy of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism the nativity play of Christi¬
anity and the Mahayana was an irrelevant interlude, while from the
standpoint of the nativity play the last act in the Hellenic tragedy was an
irrelevant epilogue.

The Hellenic tragedy was not concerned with the contemporary
epiphany of new societies of a higher order than the Hellenic Civiliza¬
tion and its Oriental adversaries. So long as these new-born higher
religions devoted themselves whole-heartedly to their mission of bring¬
ing human souls on Earth into a more intimate communion with God
than had ever before been within their reach, the religions were above
the battle that the civilizations were fighting. It was only in so far as
these religions could be tempted into neglecting their Father’s business
for the pursuit of mundane objectives that they could be enlisted as

480 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
gladiators in the conflicting civilizations’ arena; and, in so far as they did
succumb to this temptation, they were making themselves useful for
mundane purposes at the price of selling their heavenly birthright. We
have seen Zoroastrianism and Judaism thus miss their true destiny by
lending themselves to the mundane enterprise of helping to expel an in¬
trusive Hellenism from Syriac ground. Christianity was guilty of the
same spiritually disastrous deviation into a political career when it put
on the armour of Nestorius and Eutyches in order to go into action
against Hellenism as the champion of a resurgent Syriac culture; and, in
the last act of the Hellenic tragedy, Islam was deliberately converted by
its own founder from a revelation of God to Arab barbarian souls into
an anti-Hellenic engine of physical warfare. In the parallel contest be¬
tween the Hellenic Civilization and the Indie, Hinduism threw itself
with an almost Muhammadan whole-heartedness into an anti-Hellenic
cultural campaign in which a Tantric avatar of the Mah 5 y 5 na had already
half-heartedly implicated itself.

From the standpoint of Civilization, these churches, in thus going
into politics, were meritoriously justifying their existence by 'making
history’, since they were playing a decisive part in an Oriental counter¬
offensive against Hellenism which was the crowning act in the tragedy of
the Hellenes’ cultural conflict with the Orientals. Thanks to the inter¬
vention of Islam, a Syriac universal state that had been established by
the Achaemenidae and had been overthrown by Alexander was re¬
established in the shape of the Caliphate; thanks to the intervention of
Hinduism, an Indie universal state that had been established by the
Mauryas and had been swept away by Demetrius of Bactria was re¬
established by the Guptas. These political achievements of Hinduism
and Islam were the conclusive evidences of an intrusive Hellenism’s final
discomfiture and were on that account events of supreme historical im¬
portance from the mundane standpoint of an historical drama in which
the dramatis personae were civilizations. On the other hand, from the
otherworldly standpoint of a mystery play the outcome of a cultural
conflict between Hellenism and the contemporary Oriental civilizations
was a matter of spiritual indifference. The gospel of Christianity and the
Mahayana was addressed, not to societies, but to souls; and any soul in
any social environment was a potential convert to the way of salvation, 1
whatever might be the colour of the cultural veneer that this soul had
casually acquired through the chances and changes of mundane social
history.

It will be seen that our religious and our secular drama are written in
two different languages which each defy translation into the other. From
the religious standpoint of the preachers of spiritual salvation the secular
drama is a vanity of vanities; 2 from the secular standpoint of the parties
to an encounter between civilizations the religious drama is unto the
Jews a stumbling-block and unto the Greeks foolishness. 3

1 Acts xvi. 17.

J 1 Cor. i. 23.

* Eccl. i. 2.

D. THE PROCESSES OF RADIATION
AND RECEPTION

(I) THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE

I F the drama of encounters between contemporaries moves a spectator
to inquire into the processes through which the dramatis personae
produce their social and psychological effects on one another, his first
observation will be that such encounters may occur without any such
effects following from them. If the original agent’s overture meets with
a sheer rebuff on the reagent’s part, their encounter will have come and
gone without any intercourse between them arising from it at all; and, if the
overture takes the form of a violent assault to which the reagent replies
by a retort in kind, then the interaction may be energetic without ap¬
preciably transcending the physical plane that is the field of interaction
between inanimate objects. No doubt, in a collision in which the collid¬
ing 'bodies’ are not stocks or stones but are human beings, wc may be
sure that—at any rate in cases in which both parties arc civilizations—
there will always be some spiritual, as well as physical, consequence, and
that this transmission of spiritual influences will also always be in some
measure reciprocal.' In another context we have observed that War—
even war between a civilization and its transfrontier barbarians across
the estranging barrier of a limes —is a social relation through which the
parties produce spiritual as well as physical effects on one another. 1 2 * But
manifestly the spiritual intercourse that arises from encounters between
civilizations can be studied most profitably in cases in which the original
agent’s initiative results in a successful penetration of the assaulted
party’s spiritual defences—whether the ultimate denouement be a com¬
plete and lasting assimilation of this assaulted part}' by the assailant or
whether it be an eventual expurgation of the intrusive culture from the
assaulted party’s temporarily infected body social, either with or without
a previous act of creation on the religious plane .3

Spiritual intercourse has a modus operandi of its own. When one
civilization does succeed in exerting a cultural influence on the life of a
contemporary society, this spiritual event is accomplished through a
process of give and take which may be called ‘cultural radiation’ on the
agent’s part and ‘cultural reception’ on the reagent’s in terms borrowed
from the language of the Modern Western science of Physics. In the
language used in this Study for conveying the Soul’s obscure intuition of
the mysteries of Life, ‘cultural radiation’ may be described as being a
challenge presented to a civilization by one of its neighbours, and
‘cultural reception’ as being a particular orientation of the challenged
party’s faculty of mimesis. 4 A mimesis that, in the internal life of a

1 See pp. 465-6, above.

2 Sec VIII, especially pp. 13-19 and 39-44. above.

J These alternative possible denouements of encounters between contemporaries
have been surveyed on pp. 476-80, above.

* The Human Psyche’s ability to vary the orientation of its mimesis is one manifesta-

B SSOP.vra R

482 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
society, is directed backwards towards ancestral guardians of tradition
when the society is stagnant, and forwards towards living pioneers when
the society is on the move , 1 is directed outwards towards an alien way of
life in a society that has fallen under a neighbouring civilization’s
ascendancy . 2

tion of a general versatility which is characteristic of Human Nature and is perhaps
its most distinctive gift.

‘Heredity with the human individual comes more and more to mean, not (as in the
case of animals) the predisposition or capacity to act or react in certain definite ways,
but the general capacity of experience, the capacity to learn or acquire in the individual
life the power to act in an indefinite number of ways. In the human inheritance general
educability takes the place of definite specific hereditary functions. ... In other words,
the inheritance of Mind supersedes the organic inheritance more and more.... Nothing
shows more clearly the revolution which the appearance of Mind has wrought than this
far-reaching transformation which it has eiTccted in the methods and procedure of
Organic Evolution. On the animal plane structure still largely determines function, but
on the human plane mental plasticity so dominates everything else in the inheritance
that the importance of structure is completely dwarfed, and it appears as a subordinate
factor in the total human situation’ (Smuts, J. C.: Holism and Evolution, 2nd cd. (Lon¬
don 1927, Macmillan), p. 261).

1 See 11. i. 192.

* An amusing example of the reorientation of the faculty of mimesis in response to
the influence of a potently radio-active alien culture is presented in the following
experience of a Western archaeologist who was travelling in an out-of-the-way rural
district of Anatolia about the year a . d . 1924, approximately half-way through the first
phase of the totalitarian Westernizing revolution that was being carried out at the time
in Turkey under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal AtatQrk.

The purpose of the archaeologist’s journey in Anatolia was to enlarge, by fresh dis¬
coveries, the corpus of Greek inscriptions, dating from the post-Alexandrine Age of
Hellenic history, that was being built up by Modem Western scholarship. Since a high
proportion of the Anatolian Greek inscriptions that had already been brought to light
nod been discovered on site* that had been holy ground at the time when the inscriptions
had been set up there, a pioneer archaeologist's first objective in a previously unexplored
locality was to identify the site on which the chief local temple or shrine had stood in the
Hellenic Age of Anatolian history; and the vicissitudes of archaeological field-work had
demonstrated that the key to the identification of the local holy places of the Hellenic
Age was to be found in the continuity of Anatolian religious history. In an Anatolian
town or village the local indwelling numen had been apt to abide in the same spot
through successive metamorphoses of nomenclature, liturgical language, ritual, myth,
and theology; and accordingly the spot that was holy ground in the Islamic phase of
Anatolian religion would be a promising site to explore for the purpose of unearthing
Greek dedicator inscriptions. Since, in the never more than superficially Islamicized
rural districts of Anatolia, the principal numinous object was still often a sacred tree,
the archaeologist from whose lips the writer heard the story that he is about to recite
had made it a rule of thumb to start operations, in any Anatolian village that he was
visiting for the first time by asking to be shown the sacred tree, and in previous cam¬
paigns he had had no difficulty in eliciting this information, since, in the pre-Kemalian
Age, the local sacred tree had been the pride of every Anatolian village that had been for¬
tunate enough to possess one of these highly charged batteries of numinous power.
When the writer’s friend made this usual opening gambit of his in one village some five
years after the date of the Kcmalian Revolution’s outbreak, he was therefore surprised
to be met by the assembled male population with a unanimous denial of the existence
of any sacred tree in their village. The explanation of this unexpected answer was soon
forthcoming, however; for, after the visitor’s ceremonial public reception by the villagers
er, masse, the younger men took their leave, and, as soon as the coast was clear, the
elders took the stranger aside and whispered to him furtively: ‘Of course, we have a
sacred tree really, and, now that those young fellows are out of the way, we shall be
delighted to take you to see it.’ The Western visitor then realized that the old men’s
lips had been sealed in the presence of young men who, unlike their elders, had become
sufficiently Western-minded to feel that a sacred tree was a shameful relic of Antiquity
on which a Western visitor must not be allowed to set eyes. The now secretly initiated
visitor of course wished nothing better than to put himself in the old men’s hands, and
they duly led him through the village to a spot where, sure enough, there stood a tree
whose exuberant holiness was proclaimed by the luxuriance of the votive offerings of
rags with which every twig was adorned. While the archaeologist was looking at this
beacon with all the eagerness of a hound that has just caught the scent, the village police¬
man—who was not only a member of the younger generation but was also the official

THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 483

Every living human society, like every living individual human being,
is all the time emitting waves of spiritual radiation which travel out¬
wards through Space and onwards through Time till they impinge on
other societies or other individuals whom they happen to strike. Con¬
versely, every society, like every individual, is also all the time being
bombarded by ‘rays’ or ‘projectiles’ of spiritual radiation emanating
from other societies or individuals, and is all the time either repelling
this rain of spiritual missiles or, in so far as its defences are penetrated,
is being affected by these influences from outside. 1

The children of a new era in the history of Mankind that had been
inaugurated by the founders of the higher religions were familiar with
the truth that the spiritual influence of a prophet might continue to make
its effect on human souls long after the prophet’s death and far away
from the physically circumscribed scene of his activity during his own
brief life-time. In a Modern Western city of London in which the writer
of this Study was putting these words on paper in the year 1949 of the
Christian Era at a point on the surface of the globe that was more than
two thousand miles distant from Nazareth as the plane flies, no living
resident, among all the millions then congregated there, was exerting an
influence on his contemporaries and neighbours that could in any way
be compared with the spiritual effect that was being produced by Jesus
of Nazareth in London at that moment. If, in the same year, the writer
had made the journey from his home in London to the heart of Tropical
Africa, he could have verified the truth that societies as well as souls can
be spiritually radioactive; for in a.d. 1949 he could have picked up in the
Bahr-al-Ghazal or even on the Gold Coast the cultural radiation of an
Egyptiac Civilization that had been extinct, at the longest reckoning of
its life-span, since the fifth century of the Christian Era, and that had
never during its lifetime succeeded in extending its political domain into
Tropical Africa farther south than the Jazlrah between the White and
Blue Niles.*

This continuing radiation of an extinct Egyptiac culture, in competi¬
tion with a living Western culture, in regions that had been beyond the
Egyptiac Society’s geographical horizon during its lifetime, is a counter¬
part in the Spiritual Universe of a phenomenon observed in the Physical
Universe by Modern Western astronomers whose calculations showed
that, by the time when the light emitted by a star had reached the eyes
of observers on our planet in the course of an almost unimaginably long
passage through Time and Space, the star which had thus now at last
become visible might be no longer in existence and might indeed have

representative, in partibut agricolarum, of Ankara’s new Westernizing ideology—came
running up and, perceiving, to his chagrin, that he had not been in time to prevent the
confrontation of the Western observer with the tell-tale rag-bedecked branches, began,
as soon as he came within hailing distance, to shout: ‘Do not touch them! Danger of
infection! Microbe! Microbe 1 *

The story here breaks off, without going on to tell whether in this case the identifica¬
tion of the sacred tree was rewarded with the discovery of an epigraphical treasure-trove.

1 The impact of the civilizations on the primitive societies has been noticed in I. i.
149, and the impact of the ‘unrelated’ civilizations on the ‘related’ civilizations in II. i.
184-7. The question whether the apparently ‘unrelated’ civilizations themselves may
not have been brought to birth by responses to human, as well as physical, challenges
has been raised in II. i. 335-8. * See II. ii. 116-17.

484 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
been annihilated many aeons ago. In our own study of human history 1
we have similarly had to reckon with the probability that the Egyptiac
Civilization and the other representatives of the first generation of this
species of society had radiated their cultural influence abroad so vigor¬
ously that every then still surviving ci-dccant primitive society in the
World had already been adulterated through being affected by this in¬
fluence in some degree before the genesis of the civilizations of the second
generation in the second millennium b.c.

In the view of one twentieth-century Western scholar, this world-wide
radiation of the civilizations of the first generation was the source of
certain impressively lofty religious activities and ideas that were common
to a number of primitive societies still surviving in this century of the
Christian Era in physically secluded nooks and corners so remote from
one another that it was impossible to suppose that there could have been
any direct give-and-take between these widely dispersed societies since
their arrival in their respective latter-day habitats. Another twentieth-
century Western scholar sought to account for the same cultural pheno¬
menon of the presence of common features in the religion of scattered
surviving representatives of Primitive Man by the suggestion that the
hypothetical culture-wave which was presumed to have left this uniform
impress on them might not have emanated from any civilization even of
the first generation, but might have been carried to the ends of the Earth
by the primitive migrants themselves as an integral and vital part of a
common spiritual heritage from ancestors of sub-human origin who had
been transfigured into human beings by this divine illumination of their
souls. 1

Whatever the true answer might be to a question concerning the
history of Religion which was as elusive as it was momentous, it was an
indisputable matter of fact that, in more recent times, religious practices,
institutions, and beliefs had travelled far in Space-Time over the habit¬
able surface of this planet. In the present Part of this Study we have
surveyed the diffusion of the Syriac and Hellenic cultures over the Old
World, and the diffusion of the Modern Western culture round the
globe. 3 The writer of this Study had, in April 1923, the rare good fortune
to catch one of these Modern Western culture-waves in the act of reach¬
ing one of its successive destinations. In that month of that year he
arrived at Ankara at the same moment as ‘the Ideas of 1789’, and enjoyed
the experience—quite invaluable for an historian—of seeing these
spiritual potencies, which in their Western birthplace had long since
become savourless through familiarity, still produce their primordial
stimulating effect with all the vividness of novelty. At Ankara in a.d.
1923 an observer could recapture an experience which his great-grand¬
father might have enjoyed in Paris 134 years earlier; 4 and, if one of his

' In II. i. 187; V. V. 197; and VII. vii. 760-1.

2 The question at issue between Father W. Schmidt and Mrs. N. K. Chadwick has
been examined in VII. vii. 760-t.

J See pp. 439-47, 403-18, and 126-346, above.

* The distance from Paris to Ankara, which it had thus taken 'the Ideas of 1789’
134 years to travel, had been covered by the writer’s body in five days, travelling by rail.
'Our echoes roll from soul to soul and Rrow for ever and for ever', but the persistence
and pervasiveness of the diffusion of culture-waves is matched by the slowness of their

THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 485

rather more remote ancestors had visited Uppsala on the eve of the con¬
version of Sweden to Christianity, this Frank living at the close of the
first millennium of the Christian Era might have caught still alive in
Ultima Thule a body of religious ritual and myth which had been
launched into the World from a cradle in the Land of Shinar perhaps no
less than 3,500 years back.

In other contexts wc have observed the phenomenon of ‘living
museums’ where, on the outer edge of the domain of a culture that has
been geographically expansive, the culture has been ‘frozen’ in a phase that
has subsequently become obsolete at and round the centre from which
the successive waves of this culture’s radiation have been emitted. 1 We
have likewise watched the first embryo of a higher religion—the worship
of a Suffering Son and of his Sorrowing Mother—travelling from its
Sumcric source in the Land of Shinar into Egypt via Syria and into
Scandinavia via Anatolia in the era of the civilizations of the first genera¬
tion ; 2 and, in the oecumenical history of a later age, wc have watched
successive waves of Judaic and Indie religion washing round and break¬
ing over the fastness-plateaux of Abyssinia and Tibet. 5

This social phenomenon of culture-waves can be illustrated from the
history of secular institutions as well as from the history of Religion.<

One remarkable instance is the re-emergence in the New World, in
the sixteenth century of the Christian Era, of a monopolist ‘thalassocracy’
which, in its original embodiment in the Western Basin of the Mediter¬
ranean, had met a violent death before the close of the third century b.c.
The Carthaginian Empire was so peculiar an institution 5 that the possi¬
bility of its recurrence would have been ruled out in advance by any
student of History who had not lived late enough to be cognizant of the
creation of the Castilian Empire of the Indies in the sixteenth century of
the Christian Era.

The sixth-century Carthaginian empire-builders had fenced off the
southern waters of the Western Mediterranean with a ‘wooden wall’
stretching from the coast of Tripolitania to the coast of Spain; and, be¬
hind this maritime anticipation of a latter-day continental ‘iron curtain',
the Libyphoenicians had monopolized, on their own terms, the foreign
trade of a huge hinterland with enormous undeveloped economic poten¬
tialities. The profits which the Carthaginian ‘thalassocrats’ managed to
draw from this method of turning naval power to commercial account
were, as wc have seen, 6 so lucrative that the profiteers never put them¬
selves to the trouble of developing industries of their own to supply the
economic demand of their effectively ‘cornered’ market. They found it
more convenient to rely on their insulating sea-power in order to exploit
Hellenic producers as well as Iberian and African consumers. They
bought cheap from the Hellenes and sold dear to the natives; and this
business brought them fabulously high returns until their monopoly was

pace. The communication of feelings and ideas, or even institutions and techniques,
from psyche to psyche takes very much longer than the transportation of human bodies
and other physical objects from station to station. 1 See III. iii. 135-9.

* See V. v. 81-82 and 147-5*. #n <* P- 453 . *bove.

J See II. ii. 257, 365, and 40*-7- 4 See V. v. 196-7.

5 See pp. 426-9 and 437-8, above. ‘ On pp. 437~8. above.

486 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
broken, after a three-hundred-years-long run, by a fresh shift, on which
they had not reckoned, in a balance of naval power on which they had
remained content to depend entirely for the maintenance of their system.
In the sixth century b.c. the Carthaginians had wrested the naval com¬
mand of the Western Mediterranean out of Hellenic hands by uniting
the naval forces of all the Libyphoenician city-states under a Cartha¬
ginian hegemony, and in the third century B.c. they forfeited this vital
‘thalassocracy’ to a Roman adversary who had overtrumped the Cartha¬
ginian sea-power by uniting under a Roman hegemony the naval forces of
Magna Graecia. This West Mediterranean drama of the establishment,
abuse, and overthrow of a monopolist ‘thalassocracy’ was re-performed
in the Caribbean when the Spaniards adopted there the Carthaginians’
myopically selfish policy and afterwards duly suffered at French and
Dutch and British hands the Carthaginians’ Roman fate.

The Spanish avatar of a peculiar Carthaginian institution is not more
extraordinary than the reincarnation of a post-Alexandrinc Parthian
successor-state of the Achaemenian Empire in a Medieval Western
Christian successor-state of the Roman Empire. 1

‘The Holy Roman Empire’s’ affinity with the Parthian Empire is
manifested in a combination of peculiar features that are salient in both
dispensations. Both regimes were decentralized on a feudal system in
which a padishah’s juridical suzerainty over his feudatory muluk-at-
tau'd'if 1 was in practice so ineffective that power continually ebbed away
from the heart of the body politic into the limbs, without any compen¬
satory return-flow, until the commonwealth eventually died of this in¬
ability to maintain a healthy circulation of its life-blood. In both empires
the feudal organization of an agrarian society was picturesquely diversi¬
fied by a sprinkling of urban enclaves representing two other social
orders which were as alien to one another as each of them was to the
body social in which both were embedded like the currants and sultanas
in a nineteenth-century English plum cake. Industry and commerce
were concentrated within the walls of constitutionally governed city-
states, while a way of life more ancient than cither the city-state or the
feudal regime was represented by temple-states ruled by priests as vice¬
gerents for a presiding deity.

If the dignitaries of the Parthian Empire could have been recalled to
life in order to compare notes with their medieval Western ‘opposite
numbers’, Mithradatcs I (regnabat circa 171-138/7 b.c.) would have
recognized in Otto I’s (regnabat a.d. 936—73) 3 achievement of partially

1 See Dcbcvoise, N. C.: A Political History of Parthia (Chicago 1938, Chicago
University Press), pp. xxxviii-xxxix.

1 In the constitutional terminology of Islamic scholars who had salvaged some
tradition of the Parthian Age of Syriac history, the muluk-at-taica’if ('kings of shreds and
patches') was the technical name for the feudatories of a Parthian King of Kings who was
entitled to style himself Padishah (‘Foot King’) because his foot was officially planted
on his vassals’ necks.

J Mithradatcs I and Otto I both began their reigns ns kings of kingdoms beyond the
mountains, and both ended their reigns as emperors of empires bestriding the moun¬
tains. Otto made his first descent upon Italy in a . d . 951, but he was not crowned
emperor by the Pope at Rome till a . d . 962. The corresponding dates in Mithradates’
career arc his first descent upon Babylonia in hi b.c. and his decisive victory over
Antiochus Siditfis in 129 B.C.

THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 487

reconstituting the Carolingian Empire by reuniting Italy and Burgundy
with Germany a repetition of the Arsacid empire-builder's own achieve¬
ment of partially reconstituting the Achaemenian Empire by reuniting
Media and Babylonia with Khurasan. Artavasdes and Frederick II
Hohenstaufen would have condoled with one another over their tragic
common experience of a personal failure that had entailed the extinction
of the defeated padishah’s dynasty and the liquidation of the body politic
which he had striven in vain to preserve. The parochial princelings of
Fars and Brandenburg would have congratulated one another on the
assiduity with which they had taken advantage of their imperial suzer¬
ains' accumulating embarrassments in order gradually to convert a status
of vassalage into a de facto independence that was sovereignty in every¬
thing except the name. The citizens of Seleucia-on-Tigris and Scleucia-
on-Eulaeus would have agreed with the burghers of Augsburg and
Cologne that eternal vigilance was the palladium of their precarious
civic liberties. The chief priest of the temple of Anahita at Ecbatana
(Hamadan) or of^the Zoroastrian fire-altar Adhur-Gushnasp at Ganjak 1
would have been astonished to meet his double in the person of a prince-
bishop of Salzburg or of Trier. And a Parthian cataphract, confronted
with a Medieval Western knight, would have spent blissful hours in dis¬
cussing the comparative merits of the two iron-clad horsemen’s chargers,
coats of mail, shields, and lance-shafts.

The cataphract is an element in this migratory cultural complex
which enables us to catch the cultural wave in the act of travelling
through Space-Time from the Iran of the second century b.c. to the Ger¬
many of the eleventh century of the Christian Era. The Parthian man-
at-arms, portrayed in a graffito at Dura, 2 who reappears in Far Eastern
figurines of the T’ang Age (a.d. 618-907) and in the Bayeux Tapestry,
won his decisive battle against a phalanx of heavy-armed infantry not
only in Media in 129 b.c. but at Adrianople in a.d. 378 and at Hastings
in a.d. 1066. 3

It would be superfluous to draw' further on the wealth of historical
examples of the phenomenon of the diffusion of culture in order to
demonstrate its reality and its importance to a generation whose life was
being overshadowed by the overwhelming fait accompli of a diffusion of
the Modem Western culture on a literally world-wide scale. In any
attempt to estimate the part played by the diffusion of culture in human
affairs the difficulty lies not in proving that such a process as diffusion
takes place but in ascertaining whether any particular apparent instance
of the phenomenon is a genuine instance or not.

This difficulty arises from the ever present possibility that the event
or institution or aptitude or idea whose origin we are seeking to trace
may have been produced, not by the radiation of some past achievement

1 Sec Christensen, A.: L’lran sous les Satsattides (Copenhagen 1936, Levin and
Munksgaard), p. 161.

* See IV. iv. 439, n. 4*

J This diffraction of a human observer’s vision of a single event into a number of
instances corresponding to different positions of the same event in Space-Time is the
inevitable penalty of the observer’s own inescapable handicap of being himself a
creature of the Space-Time field in which he is taking his observations (see IV. iv. 44s,
with n. 10).

488 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
from abroad, but by a fresh act of creation here and now. The pheno¬
menon of diffusion does not account in itself for the existence of the
objects that are transmitted; on the contrary, there would be nothing to
be either radiated or received if some original act of creation had not
previously occurred; and an act that has been performed once may be
repeated time and again. We have therefore to be perpetually on our
guard against falling into the error of invoking the process of diffusion to
account for some resemblance or identity between two social situations
at different positions in Time-Space when the true cause of this re¬
semblance or identity may be the uniformity of Human Nature, and its
consequent capacity to repeat an original act of creation in response to
the recurrence of a challenge, without there having been any transmission
of influence from the party which made this response on an earlier
occasion to the party which has made an identical response to an
identical challenge on a later occasion in virtue of an independent re¬
action of the same Human Nature to the same circumstances.

For example, the indisputable fact that in the twentieth century of the
Christian Era all surviving non-Wcstern civilizations had been deeply
penetrated and intimately affected by the radiation of the Modern
Western culture was no proof that these civilizations themselves were
merely so many deposits left by some earlier ubiquitous wave of cultural
radiation, and were not original products of so many independent re¬
sponses to so many separate challenges. In a previous context' we have
come to the conclusion that, when due account has been taken of the
part played in the geneses of the civilizations by the diffusion of culture-
elements, cither singly or in complexes, the decisive act by which each
civilization has been brought to birth proves in every case to have been
an act of new creation, and not an act of receiving some ready-made gift
from abroad; and, on the strength of this survey of the evidence, we
have combated 1 the thesis of a diffusionist school of contemporary
British archaeologists who believed, not only that a latter-day Modern
Western Civilization’s feat of radiating its culture all round the globe
had been anticipated by a likewise ubiquitous radiation of the Egyptiac
culture, but also that the spread of this migratory Egyptiac culture fully
accounted for the existence of all other civilizations known to History—
which, on this showing, would not be entitled to rank as separate civiliza¬
tions at all, but would be described with greater accuracy as being merely
so many versions of a single Civilization, to be written with a capital ‘C’,
which had been brought to birth by a unique act of original creation in
the Lower Nile Valley in the fourth millennium B.c.

In any particular case of a similarity or an identity between two or
more social situations presenting themselves at different positions in
Space-Time, a cautiously empirical student of History will beware of
committing himself to an a priori aetiology based on the demonstrably
fallacious assumption that all such similarities or identities must be
effects of some single exclusively operative cause; he will approach each
presentation of this historical problem with an open mind on the ques¬
tion whether the case in point is an effect of the diffusion of culture or

« In II. i. 299-338. 2 In II. i. 424-40.

THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 489

whether it is an effect of the uniformity of Human Nature. He will be
prepared to find both these causes contributing to produce the result in
varying proportions; and he will treat each case as an individual problem
on its own merits.

There are, for example, positive grounds for our suggestion that the
Castilian avatar, in the New World, of a Carthaginian Empire in the Old
World and the Hohenstaufcn avatar, astride the Alps, of an Arsacid
Empire bestriding the Zagros are two cases of correspondences that are
to be regarded as results of the diffusion of culture, and not as products
of the uniformity of Human Nature. These grounds are that, in either
case, the complex of culture-elements that is common to the histories of
two different societies does not present itself in the same historical
setting in its two separate appearances on the stage.

The Carthaginian Empire was, as we have seen, a Libyphocnician re¬
sponse to an Hellenic challenge in a contest between Phoenicians,
Hellenes, and Etruscans for the command of the Western Basin of the
Mediterranean; and this maritime competition in the Mediterranean
between three parties in the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries B.c. has
its recognizable historical counterpart in a similar struggle between the
Crusaders, the East Romans, and the Muslims in the same natural
‘naumachia’ in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries of the
Christian Era. The Western Christian ‘thalassocracy’ in which we have
seen an avatar of the Carthaginian ‘thalassocracy* does not, however,
make its appearance either in the thirteenth century of the Christian
Era or in the Mediterranean, where we should expect to find it appear¬
ing if its striking similarity to the Carthaginian ‘thalassocracy’ had been
an effect of the uniformity of Human Nature producing an identical,
though independent, response to a separate, but identical, challenge.
The Castilian ‘thalassocracy’ presents itself as late as the turn of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and as far away as the Basin of the
Caribbean, on the farther side of the Atlantic; and in this different time
and place the parts of the play are performed by a different cast of
actors. The contest for the command of the Spanish Main was not a
further round in the fight between the Crusaders, East Romans, and
Muslims who had been competing for command of the Mediterranean
in the Medieval Age of Western history ; it was a domestic brawl between
divers members of the Western Christian family; and in the last act the
Castilian monopoly of the New World succumbed to simultaneous but
unconcerted attacks on the part of Dutch, English, and French buc¬
caneers—in contrast to the concentration of the naval strength of Magna
Graecia under Roman hegemony which was required in order to break
the Carthaginian monopoly of the Maghrib in the last act of a West
Mediterranean drama in which both the stage and the cast were the
same in the third century B.c. as they had been in the eighth.

Thus the Carthaginian and Castilian ‘thalassocracics’ are analogous to
one another in their institutional form without being analogous to one
another in their historical roles; and their non-correspondence in point
of roles suggests that their correspondence in point of form is unlikely to
have been an outcome of the uniformity of Human Nature; for, though

490 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
this uniformity can and docs generate uniform effects in eases between
which there is no historical connexion, it produces this result by return¬
ing identical responses to challenges that, though separately delivered at
mo different positions in Time-Space, are identical in character. We
have just seen, however, that the challenges by which the Carthaginian
and the Castilian ‘thalassocracy’ were evoked were not identical in
character with one another. In this case, accordingly, the hypothesis of
the diffusion of a culture-complex would seem to hold the held as the
more convincing explanation for a similarity between two institutions
occurring at different positions in Space-Time.

The same explanation for the morphological correspondence between
the Holy Roman Empire and the Parthian Empire commends itself for
the same reason. In spite of their remarkable similarity in structure and
ethos, these two politico-social dispensations played widely different
roles in the respective histories of the Western and the Syriac Society.
The Parthian Empire was a Syriac response to the violent challenge
presented by the conquest of the Syriac World by Hellenic force of
arms, whereas the Holy Roman Empire was a Western response to a
peaceful challenge from an alien civilization which was not the sister,
but was the parent, of Western Christendom. In attempting to recon¬
stitute the Carolingian Empire, Otto I was seeking to achieve a second
rebirth of the Roman world-order with the object of saving the life of
an adolescent civilization which was in less deadly danger from assaults
at the hands of external enemies than from its own inconscionable bar¬
barism. On the other hand, in attempting to reconstitute the Achae-
menian Empire, Mithradates I was seeking to re-establish a prematurely
shattered Syriac universal state with the object of saving the life of a
middle-aged civilization whose domain had been overrun by alien con¬
querors. The respective roles played by the Arsacid Empire and the
Holy Roman Empire in Syriac and in Western history are in fact so
widely different that, in this case again, the process of the diffusion of
culture seems more likely than the operation of the uniformity of Human
Nature to have been the cause of the striking morphological resemblance
between these two regimes.

On the other hand, uniformity rather than diffusion may best explain
the similarity of the Hittite regime in Eastern Anatolia in the fourteenth
and thirteenth centuries b.c. to the Arsacid regime east of the Euphrates
in the last two centuries b.c. and the first two centuries of the Christian
Era and to the Holy Roman Empire in Central Europe in the Medieval
Age of Western history; for it seems highly improbable that the Arsacid
dispensation’s unquestionable resemblance to the Hittite dispensation
can have been the effect of a culture-wave travelling from a thirteenth-
century Cappadocia to a second-century Khurasan. We have ample
evidence concerning the radiation of culture in South-West Asia during
the last two millennia b.c., and this evidence shows that the prevailing
set of the cultural current throughout that period was, not from Cap¬
padocia to the Tigris-Euphrates Basin and Iran, but from the Tigris-
Euphrates Basin and Iran to Cappadocia. The Sumerian and Akkadian
languages and their cuneiform script, the Sumeric science of divination,

THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 491

the worship of Ishtar, the tale of Gilgamcsh , 1 the Assyrian style of art,
the religion founded by Zarathustra, the Achaemenian feudal system , 2
all travelled this royal road in this north-westward direction. The only
counter-wave that we can catch in the act of travelling in the opposite
direction—from the Hittite to the Babylonic World—is a style of
domestic architecture which was borrowed in the seventh century B.c.
from the Refugee Hittite communities in Northern Syria by the Assyrians
under the name of bit-hilani (‘the house with windows ’). 3

The introduction of the Hittite hieroglyphic script from Cappadocia
into Syria is not another case in point; for, though the invention of a
new script of this type in the second millennium B.C., as an alternative to
taking over the Sumcric cuneiform script ready-made, had been a re¬
markable feat of creativity in its day, the syllabic phonetic as well as the
ideographic technique of writing had been superseded in Syria by the
Ugaritic and Phoenician alphabets by the time when the Refugee
Hittites brought their hieroglyphic script into Syria with them from the
north-western side of the Taurus; and there is no evidence that either
this script or the Indo-European language 4 conveyed in it was adopted
by any of the non-Hittite inhabitants of Syria in the last millennium
B.C., while there is impressive evidence of the use of the Aramaean
language and alphabet in the Refugee Hittite communities.

On this showing, w'c shall be chary of trying to explain the corre¬
spondence between the Hittite Empire and the Arsacid and Holy Roman
empires as an effect of the process of culture-diffusion, which is a
possible explanation of the resemblance that the Arsacid and Holy
Roman empires bear to one another; and, a fortiori, the similarity of
fithos between ‘the New Empire’ that established itself in Egypt in the
sixteenth century B.c. and the Ming regime that established itself in
China in the fourteenth century of the Christian Era is to be explained
as an outcome of independent identical responses to separate identical
challenges, considering that there is no evidence and no likelihood of any
direct culture-radiation from the Egyptiac World of the second millen¬
nium B.c. to the Far Eastern World of the second millennium of the
Christian Era, while there is a manifest similarity between the challenges
to which ‘the New Empire’ and the Ming Empire were responses. The
Mongol conquerors who were expelled from Intramural China by the
Ming resembled the Hyksos conquerors who were expelled from Lower
Egypt by Amosis in being barbarians imbued with a tincture of an alien
civilization; and it was this blend of Barbarism with an alien higher
culture that aroused in the hearts of the barbarians’ cultivated victims
the fanatically ‘Zealot’ temper which was the spirit of ‘the New Empire’
of Egypt and the Ming Empire alike . 5

Another case in which culture-diffusion cannot be the explanation of

» Sec I. i. ti2. * See VI. vii. 123-4-

J See Delaporte, L.: let Hittites (Paris 1936, La Renaissance du Livre). p. 330.

* The language conveyed in the Hittite hieroglyphic script had proved to be a third
language of the Hittite family, distinct from, though closely akin to, both ‘the language of
Nyssa’, which was the official language of Khatti, and the ‘Luvian’ language current in
the mountainous hinterland of the Mediterranean seaboard of Anatolia.

s On this point see V. v. 348-53-

492 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
a far-reaching similarity between two social dispensations that lie far
apart from one another in the Time-dimension is one in which the later
embodiment of an identical dispensation occurred in situ in a physical
environment whose features were so strongly marked and so static
within the chronological limits of the whole period in question that in
this case a local uniformity of Physical Nature co-operated with a general
uniformity of Human Nature to evoke an identic, though independent,
response to a separate, but identic, challenge. The common geographical
field of these successive identic responses to an identic challenge from
both the physical and the human environment was Continental Euro¬
pean Greece; the two periods in which the same drama was performed
on the same stage ran respectively from the seventeenth to the twelfth
century b.c. and from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century of the
Christian Era; and in both these two periods of Continental European
Greece’s history an identic sequence of events occurred.

First the country was conquered by invaders from overseas who
brought with them an exotic culture: Minoan invaders from Crete in the
seventeenth century b.c. 1 and French and Venetian invaders from
Western Christendom in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era.
These invaders adapted their tactics to the physical structure of the in¬
vaded country by making artificial fortresses out of some of the natural
fortresses in which the landscape abounded. The sites that they were apt
to select among the almost innumerable sites at their disposal were those
which commanded the rare cultivable plains or the rarer passes leading
from one plain to another or, best of all, both a plain and a pass com¬
municating with the next plain in locations where Nature offered to a
castle-builder with an eagle eye the possibility of making this economy
of precious man-power. An Achaean Menelaion perched on the bluffs
overhanging the River Eurotas opposite the site of the town of Sparta
was as good a vantage point as a Frankish Mistri for commanding the
vale of Hollow Lacedaemon which lay between these two castles; but
Mistrk was a better-chosen site than the Menelaion because a garrison
posted there could control not only the Sparta plain but also the Lace¬
daemonian mouth of the Langadha Pass that gave a passage from
Lacedaemon into Messenia. In the Frankish Age William de Villc-
hardouin’s castle at Mistra 2 had its complement in Geoffrey de Ville-
hardouin’s castle at Kalamata commanding the Messenian mouth of
the Langadha Pass as well as the southern bay of the Messenian plain,
while in the Mycenaean Age an Achaean Menelaion and a Frankish
Mistrk had their respective counterparts in the Argolid at Tiryns and
Mycenae.

A physical environment which thus made it easy for invaders to
establish their control over the principal plains and passes also made it
difficult for them to penetrate the surrounding wilderness of mountains,
and in these encompassing highlands they found themselves compelled

» See I. i. 94, with n. i.

* William's personal choice of the site of Mistr* in a.d. 1248, and the subsequent
building of the castle of Passuvant on his council's advice, arc recorded in The Chronicle
of the Morea, 11 . 2985-3007, on pp. 200-1 of J. Schmitt's edition (London 1004,
Methuen).

THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 493

to leave the native population unsubdued de facto . 1 The invaders had,
in fact, to content themselves with the skeleton occupation of the
country which they had achieved at the first stroke, 1 and they were not
even left in undisturbed occupation of these restricted territorial
acquisitions; for the very success of the original invaders’ feat of arms
tempted other, still hardier, adventurers, following in their wake, to
emulate their prowess by wresting their conquests from them.

In the second millennium of the Christian Era the Burgundian
French lords of a medieval Frankish Duchy of Athens were exterminated
by Catalan interlopers, the Catalans were superseded by Florentines,
the Florentines were ousted by 'Osmanlis; in the second millennium

I While Mistrl controlled Hollow Lacedaemon and the pass leading from it to
Kalomita in Messenia, Mistri and Passavant, between them, contained the unsubdued
highlands of the Southern TaJ?getus, which, at the time of the Frankish conquest of
the Morea, were occupied by a tribe of untamed Slav barbarians, the Mclingi. These
Slav wild highlanders had managed to maintain their independence here after the East
Roman Government's re-establishment of its authority over the rest of the Morea in the
reign of the Emperor Basil I ( imperabat a.d. 866-8S6). It is noteworthy that the same
highland fastness played the same role in at least two other passages of history. It was
tenanted by the Albanian Muslim Varduniots from a.d. 1715, when the ‘Osmanlis re¬
conquered the Morea from the Venetians, until the Greek Christian uprising in the
Morea in a.d. 1821 (see p. 494, below); and in the Archaic Age of Hellenic history it
was tenanted by a band of Minyac—survivors from the cataclysm of a post-Minoan
Vblkerwanderung—whom a rising city-state of Sparta found it difficult to reduce to
submission (sec Herodotus, Book IV, chaps. 145-8).

1 The conquerors' one chance of extending and consolidating their first hold lay in
the possibility of obtaining reinforcements of their own kith and kin; and we happen to
have indications that the Pelopid and the Champenois princes of the Morea alike felt a
lively concern about this.

In the Odyuiy (Book IV, 11. 171-7) Menelaus the Pelopid prince of Sparta is repre¬
sented as saying to the son of an Odysseus who had been Menclaus’s companion-in-arms
on the Achaean expedition against Troy:

‘I had it in mind, if your father had turned up, to bestow on him tokens of my affection
beyond anything that I would have done for any other of the Argives—if only Zeus
the all-sccing dweller on Olympus had granted the two of us a happy return across the
salt sea in the swift ships. Why, I would have established a fort (vdcoa wo’Acv) for him
here in Argos and have built a home here for him: I would have brought him from
Ithaca with his property and his child and his war-band (n&oiv Aaotoi); 1 would have
gutted for him one of the [native] forts in the [unsubdued] hinterland of jny own
dominions (filav iro’Aiv t’faAairafat f al urpivacraoimv, cvaooovrai 6’ f/ioi aimo).’

This Homeric strophe has its nntistropne in The Chronicle oj the Morea (11. 1847-66,
on pp. 1 f4~7 of J. Schmitt’s edition) in the account there of Prince William de Champ-
litte’s investiture of Geoffrey de Villchardouin with the fief of KalamSta and Aikadhik
as a reward for Geoffrey’s friendly act in parting company with his Frankish fellow
conquerors of Constantinople and Salonica in order to throw in his lot with the Frankish
adventurers in the Morea. After William has invested Geoffrey and duly received his
homage in return, the prince addresses his new^ vassal (ibid., 11. 1870-2) as follows:

‘Now that you hold your fief under my overlordship, it is meet and right that you
should be my true liege in all things, and that I, for my part, should trust all my fortunes
in your hands.’

An identical picture of the relations between a Morcot prince and his vassal is drawn
by the Homeric Menelaus:

'Had we been here together, how often we should have enjoyed one another’s com¬
pany! Nothing till the fall of Death’s black curtain would have parted us—nothing short
of this would have stopped us showing, and enjoying, our mutual affection’ ( Odyssey ,
Book IV, II. 178-80).

Menelaus was not called upon to say in what quarter of his principality s dissident hinter¬
land he would have planted Odysseus and his Cephallenians; but we know the approxi¬
mate limits of Geoffrey’s fief, and it is a curious coincidence that this medieval Frankish
lordship should have been approximately co-extensivc with the territory held by a
Nclcid Nestor and his Minyans, together with the seven forts that, in the Iliad (Book JX.
11. 149-53), Agamemnon is represented as offering to bestow on Achilles as an induce¬
ment to tne offended leader of the Myrmidons to stop sulking when his hard-pressed
companions-in-arms are in such sore need of his help.

494 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION

B.c. the Minoan lords of the Argolid were superseded by Achaeans,
and the Achaeans by Pelopids who—if Modern Western Hittitology
were to rehabilitate Hellenic legend—might prove to have made their
way to the Morea from an Anatolian homeland in the neighbourhood of
the cradle of the Ottoman Power. 1 While the castles built by the original
invaders thus repeatedly changed hands, the feudal rdgime of which these
castles were the physical embodiments persisted through these succes¬
sive changes of ownership; but a monotonously unedifying game of
grab came at last to a catastrophic end in both performances of the play.
In both cases the unsubdued native highlanders were gradually re¬
inforced by the infiltration of barbarians from the interior of the Balkan
Peninsula, and in the last act the interloping feudal regime was success¬
fully assailed and overwhelmed by a resurgence of the indigenous popu¬
lation. In the Morea in a.d. 1821 the Ottoman Turkish Muslim cpigoni
of the Villehardouins were exterminated by the united forces of native
Moreot Orthodox Christian Greeks and immigrant Orthodox Christian
Albanians who had seeped into the Morea since the fourteenth century; 2
in the same arena at some date in the course of the twelfth century b.c.
the Pelopid epigoni of the seventeenth-century Minoan invaders of the
Argolid were overwhelmed by an avalanche of barbarians speaking the
North-West dialect of the Ancient Greek language.

This combination of correspondences between the history of Con¬
tinental European Greece in the second millennium b.c. and the history
of the same country in the second millennium of the Christian Era is so
remarkable that we may find ourselves wondering after all whether the
Pelopids may not have emitted some wave of cultural radiation which
the Villehardouins managed to pick up across a twenty-four-centurics-
wide Time-interval; and the sheer length of this interval—redoubtable
though it be when measured on the Time-scale of the histories of civiliza¬
tions—might not, perhaps, be an insuperable obstacle to the entertain¬
ment of this fantasy. The consideration that makes its entertainment
impossible, and compels us in this case to explain the correspondences as
effects of the uniformity of Physical and Human Nature, is the gigantic
historical fact that this Time-interval of twenty-four centuries between
the overthrow of the Pelopids and the arrival of the Villehardouins was
occupied in Continental European Greece by the histories of the Hellenic
Civilization and its Orthodox Christian successor. Both these interven¬
ing cultures used the enduring physical landscape of Continental
European Greece for their own purposes; but these purposes were
different from the common purpose of the feudal lords who dominated
the same country both before and after. A landscape on which a feudal
regime was founded by Achaean and Frankish castle-builders was
utilized with equal success by the political architects of the Hellenic
Civilization for the entirely different purpose of creating a galaxy of
city-states. Between the pre-Hellenic and the post-Byzantine feudal
rdgime in Continental European Greece there is a vitai pausa 3 that pre-

* Sec p. 449, n. 2, above.

1 Sec V. v. 293-4.

J Lucretius: De Return Natura, Book III, I. 860.

THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 495

eludes all possibility of any historical connexion between these two
identic feudal dispensations on the same site.

This is perhaps as far as we can carry our investigation of the part
played in human history by the process of culture-diffusion, and we may
now’ go on to inquire into the divers conditions in which culture-rays are
transmitted from one body social to another.

(II) THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE
Culture-Patterns and their Instability

There arc alternative possible conditions in w’hich culture-rays may
be transmitted because there are alternative possible states in which a
culture may present itself, whether we happen to be observing it in
process of radiation from one body social to another or in its birthplace
in the bosom of the body social that is its source. The state of the radiat¬
ing body at any given moment, whichever of the alternative states this
may be, will determine the state of the culture-rays that this body is
emitting at the time. If the emitting body's state changes, the state of
the rays emanating from it will change correspondingly. In fact, the
texture of a culture-ray will always faithfully reproduce the fabric of the
society that is its source, 1 unless and until the ray, in its passage through
Space-Time, comes to be affected by another social force as a result of
impinging upon a foreign body.

The instability of the fabric of a culture is something intrinsic in the
nature of Culture itself, for it arises from the fact that Human Life
expresses and fulfils itself in a diversity of constituent activities; and
this primordial plurality of Life cannot be reduced to unity by the
crude procrustean operation of eliminating all these activities save one,
since Humanity cannot renounce any of them without ceasing to be
human. The unity of purpose and direction that is a necessary’ condition
of spiritual health and is indeed the distinctive characteristic of a healthily
growing human society is achieved, not by eliminating any of the in¬
dispensable elements of human culture, but by co-ordinating all these
elements in a harmony such as is maintained by the various instruments
in an orchestra w-hen the musicians are playing a symphony under the
leadership of a conductor.

‘What has happened in the great art-styles happens also in cultures as
a whole. All the miscellaneous behaviour directed towards getting a living,
mating, warring, and worshipping the gods is made over into consistent
patterns in accordance with unconscious canons of choice that develop
within the culture. Some cultures, like some periods of art, fail of such in¬
tegration, and about many others we know too little to understand the
motives that actuate them. But cultures at every level of complexity, even
the simplest, have achieved it. Such cultures are more or less successful
attainments of integrated behaviour, and the marvel is that there can be
so many of these possible configurations.

1 This point has been noticed already in III. iii. 152 and V. v. 199.

* Benedict, Ruth: Patterns of Culture (London 1935, Routledge), p. 48.

496 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
This dictum of one of the leading Western anthropologists of the day
was being borne out during the lifetime of the writer of this Study by
the progress of the sociologists’ investigation into the ways of life of
societies in process of civilization, side by side with the anthropologists’
work on societies of the primitive species. In both these two new pro¬
vinces which Modern Western Science had been carving out for itself
in the realm of Human Affairs, 1 it was becoming clearer year by year
that a society’s culture—whether, at the time of observation, the society
happened to be stationary on the primitive level or in motion in the
movement known as civilization 2 —was normally a unity in the sense
that the normal relation between all the diverse emotions and ideas and
institutions and aptitudes constituting its social stock-in-trade was a
condition of interdependence. An inquirer who set out to follow up in
the life of any society the relations of any indigenous culture-clement
(as contrasted with an alien element acquired from abroad) would find
these relations ramifying so widely that this single clement would prove
to have links—and these sometimes in unexpected directions and of a
surprising kind—with almost all the other elements in this particular
culture-pattern. Such an analysis would reveal connexions between
things which at first sight might appear to have nothing whatsoever to
do with one another; and, if the course of History performed the
equivalent of a laboratory experiment by removing or modifying any
single feature in the pattern, this local change would show itself capable
of producing a disturbance of the entire social structure, even though
the feature in question might have appeared insignificant before the
importance of its role in the whole organization had been vindicated by
this practical test. 1

This interdependence which is so characteristic a quality of a culture
in its normal state is, of course, conspicuous when salient features of a
culture-pattern arc taken as the illustrations of it. It could be illustrated
strikingly, for example, by tracing the ramifications of the two master-
institutions of the Western Civilization of the writer’s day: that Modern
Western Democracy and Modern Western Industrialism* which had
been the principal engines through whose potently reciprocating action
an aggressive society had been producing its profoundly subversive
effects upon the lives of its contemporaries. In order to understand the
nature and genesis of these two imposing and formidable features of the
Modern Western way of life, the student would have to make himself
familiar with the w'holc history of the Western Civilization since the
Dark Age, and this not merely in its political and economic aspects.
He would not be able fully to comprehend the work of a Ford or a Singer
without knowing something about the work of a Calvin and a Benedict
and running a sensitive finger along the chain of historical development

1 See XI. ix. 185-9.

1 This contingent and therefore merely provisional definition of the difference be¬
tween a primitive society and a civilization, in terms of an observable difference in their
respective attitudes towards life at the time of observation, has been offered in II. i.

interdependence of the divers elements in a culture-pattern is illustrated by the
effects of a successful assault upon the social life of the assaulted party (see pp. 530-
63, below). 4 See IV. iv. 137-98,

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 497
that linked the at first sight mutually incongruous activities of these
quaintly diverse personalities at different points far apart in Time-Space.
Nor would he be able fully to comprehend Modern Western parliamen r
tary government or political propaganda or ideology without knowing
something about Western Christian monastic orders and papal congre¬
gations and theology. The truth is that every indigenous culture-clement
in the life of a society arises within, and in relation to, the whole of that
society’s social structure, and finds its own proper place and special
function in the structure upon coining to maturity.

This normal integration of the indispensable constituent activities of
Human Life into one or other of the divers alternative possible culture-
patterns—each oriented to some particular activity or complex of
activities which gives the culture its distinctive character by playing the
dominant part in the co-ordination of its life—is the explanation of that
qualitative difference between one culture and another which is discern¬
ible in a review of the primitive societies and is conspicuous in a review
of the civilizations. In a previous context 1 we have observed that in the
histories of the civilizations a progressive qualitative differentiation is
one of the characteristics of growth ; 2 but we have also found that growth
is not an automatic process but is the hard-won reward of an effort that
makes a continual and exacting demand on the growing individual’s or
growing society’s will-power, since it has to be perpetually renewed in a
series of responses to challenges in which a successful response to one
challenge always evokes a fresh challenge, with the consequence that
every solution of one problem brings with it the presentation of another. 1
This means that the abiding efficacy of a culture-pattern can never be
taken for granted with impunity; for a particular culture-pattern is the
imprint of a solution of a particular human problem; and, if spiritual

1 In III. iii. 377-90.

* The choices through which a society acouircs its individual character may, of course,
be negative as well as positive. In Hellenic history, for example, the aesthetic penchant
that is the salient feature of the obverse face of the Hellenic culture has its negative
counterpart on the reverse side in the Hellenic Society's neglect to turn to practical
account the Alexandrian scientist Hero’s invention of the steam-engine—though im¬
provements in the means of communication might have been expected to be nt a pre¬
mium in a post-Alexandrir.e Hellenic World in which there had been a sudden vast
increase in the material scale of Hellenic life as a result of the Macedonians’ conquest
of the Achaemenian Empire. Even if the failure to apply Hero's invention in the in¬
ventor’s own generation could be explained as an effect of the political anarchy that was
afflicting the Hellenic World in the third century B.c., it would still have to be explained
why, after the political unification of the Mediterranean Basin under a Pax Rotnana,
steam traction was never applied to the maritime transport of grain from Alexandria
to Puteoli or to the overland transport of troops, officials, and mails over the network
of imperial roads—considering that the maintenance of an indispensable Pax Rcmana
depended on the efficiency of the imperial regime in providing facilities for long¬
distance traffic.

It is eaually significant that the Far Eastern Society showed a similar indifference to
the practical potentialities of the Far Eastern inventions of printing, gunpowder, and the
manner’s compass—all of which were subsequently turned to such epoch-making prac¬
tical account, for both good and evil, by Western entrepreneuri who might never have
succeeded in inventing for themselves these original creations of the Far Eastern genius.

‘The fact that these inventions were never developed in China in the dynamic style
which characterised their effect on the culture of the West ought to be recognised as
proof that the genius of Chinese Civilisation chose not to develop in the channels which
appeared obvious to the West, but sought by preference other media for the highest

K ression of the powers of Man’ (Lattimore, Owen: Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict
w York 1932, Macmillan), pp. 168-9). 1 See III. iii. 1x2-27.

498 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
health is to be preserved and social growth is to be maintained, solution
must follow solution as one problem gives rise to another. The impulse
to perpetuate a traditional culture-pattern that has done good service to
Society in its day can defeat its own purpose, as we have seen, 1 by pro¬
ducing cither an enormity or a revolution. A culture-pattern can be kept
in being only by being continually adapted to meet the manifold require¬
ments of ever-changing circumstances; and the intrinsic difficulty of
this indispensable task is so formidably great that it is not surprising to
find that culture-patterns are precarious structures which arc perpetually
in danger of breaking up.

When a culture-pattern docs break up for one reason or another, the
divers constituent activities that have been co-ordinated with one
another so long as the pattern has lasted now fall apart and go their
separate ways along respective lines of least resistance that at best pro¬
duce a spiritual chaos and, at worst, a spiritual discord which declares
itself in the forms of schism in the Body Social 2 and schism in the Soul . 1
In previous contexts 4 we have noticed in passing what the principal
component elements of a culture are. At the present point in our Study
it will be convenient to carry our analysis a stage farther.

If we venture, at our peril, to illuminate an obscure subject of inquiry
with the borrowed light of a simile, we may perhaps not inaptly liken an
integrated culture to a flint that has been compacted by the age-long
pressure of enormous forces, and the disintegration of a culture to the
work of a demonic flint-knapper who is master of the knack of splitting
one flake after another off the core of the stone on which he is exerting
his uncanny sleight of hand. In the knapping of a culture the outermost
and most easily detachable flake is the economic side of Human Life,
which may be defined as the field in which Man exerts his power over
Non-Human Nature. The next flake, and also the next most easy to
detach, is the political side of Life, which may be defined as the field in
which Man exerts his power over his fellow human beings. When these
two superficial layers of Life have been split off, a cultural core remains;
and this core may be defined, in terms of Life, as the heart of a culture
where the Soul participates in God’s creative work by grappling with its
first and last adversary the Self 5 —a more formidable adversary than
either its human neighbour or its physical environment, because this
domestic adversary is identical with the Soul against which it contends.
The field of cultural action, in this narrower and stricter usage of the
term, is not, of course, confined within the bounds of the Self, since
Man is a social animal who cannot be himself without being at the same
time in communion with other spirits . 6 In the cultural heart, as well as
on the political surface, of Human Life, Man encounters not only his
Creator but his fellow human beings; but his intercourse with his fellows
on the cultural plane takes place on a moral level high above the canon-

In IV. iv. 133-7.
v. v. 376-568

J See V. v. 376-568 and vi. 1-175.

4 In III. iii. 151-2; IV. iv. 57; and V. v. 199-201.

* Sec V. v. 35-376.

5 'The essential strategies in the war of Good against Evil are conducted within the
intimate interior of personalities’ (Butterfield, Herbert: Christianity and Hiitory (London
1949, Bell), p. 91). * On this point, sec III. iii. 223-30.

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 499

floor of politics. On the cultural plane coercion is of no avail; for the
only form of power that can here be employed with effect is the power of
spiritual attraction through which one soul moves another by love and
not by force. 1

This essence of a culture which remains after the political and econo¬
mic integuments of the core have been flaked off proves, however, to be
fissile in its turn in our satanic flint-knapper’s hands. By a supreme tour
de force of his calamitous ‘know-how’ this mythical impersonation of
Original Sin is able to disintegrate the very core of cultural life by
splitting off from it successively a linguistic, an intellectual, and an
artistic flake until the religious nucleus of the core is exposed. This
religious quintessence of a culture is perhaps proof against disintegration,
but it is not proof against stultification through being isolated from all
the other activities of Life and thereby being inhibited from exercising
the pervasive influence which Religion is able to exercise in a healthily
integrated body social.

The social and spiritual effects of the knapping of a linguistic flake
from a cultural core have been noticed already in this Study in our
survey of the careers of languages which have been set free to travel far
and wide as lingue franche because they have been divorced from their
original function of serving as mother tongues. 2 The knapping of an
intellectual flake comprising the technological, scientific, and philoso¬
phical substance of a culture for which a lingua franca serves as a vehicle,
but not comprehending the culture’s artistic flake or its religious quintes¬
sence, has likewise come to our notice by forcing itself upon our attention
in two historic instances: the intellectual abstract of the Modern
Western Christian culture that ran like wildfire round the globe, after it
had been knapped off by Western Man’s own hands towards the close
of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, 3 and the intellectual
abstract of the Hellenic culture that eventually captivated the Syriac

t ‘If Christianity fights in the World it does not (when churches sre in their right
mind) wage war on actual flesh and blood.... For this reason the historian... in the last
resort. . . secs human history as a pilgrimage of all Mankind, and human achievement
as a grand co-operative endeavour, in which whigs and tories complement one another,
both equally necessary to the picture’ (Butterfield, op. cit., p. 91).

2 See V. v. 483-527.

3 See pp. 118-19 and 314, above, and 516-18, below. Assuredly it was no accident that
a Western Christian culture which, in its integrity, had been violently rejected earlier in the
seventeenth century by the Japanese, was eagerly accepted before the close of the same
century by the Greek, Serb, and Russian Orthodox Christians in the secularized version
of it that had been produced in the meantime ns a result of a Western reaction against
the Western temper that had discharged itself in the Western Wars of Religion. It is also
assuredly no accident that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Venetian
university of Padua should have been the alma mater both of Modem Western pioneer
men of science in the fields of medical end physiological research and of Venetian and
Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christian pioneer Wcsternizers. The precocity of the Vene¬
tian regime in adopting a policy of religious toleration before this had yet become the
general rule in the Western World made it possible in Padua at the turn of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries for the Protestant Englishman William Hervey [Harvey] to
carry out the research that resulted in his discovery of the circulation of the blood, and
for the Orthodox Greeks Cyril Lotikaris and Alexander Mavrogordito to give themselves
a Western university education. The intellectual impact of 1 lervey’a discovery on Mavro-

E irdito’s mind has been noticed already in this Study on p. 163, n. 3, and p. 17*. «• 8.

or the part played by the University of Padua in the seventeenth-century Western
scientific revolution, sec Butterfield, Herbert: The Origins o] Modem Science, 1300-
1800 (London 1949, Bell), pp. 41-44.

500 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
World after it had been knapped off by Hellenic Man’s own hands in
the post-Alcxandrine Age of Hellenic history. 1 The artistic flake is the
most difficult of all to knap off from the religious nucleus of a culture’s
core; for Art serves Religion, as Language serves Thought, by affording
it a vehicle; and we have seen Hellenic Art renew its youth and recover
its creativity by entering into the service of the MahSyana.* Yet even
Art can be divorced from its religious source of inspiration at the price
of lapsing into either a sordid vulgarity or a repulsive barbarism. 3

In a twentieth-century Western World the secularization of both Art
and Thought, which had been perpetrated progressively by Western
hands in the course of a quarter of a millennium, had come to be taken
so entirely for granted that the abnormality of this act of cultural self-
mutilation was now hardly perceptible to any Western eyes that were
not doubly enlightened by the gift of genius and by the experience of
penalization. In that age of Western history a distinguished Negro
American singer felt the thrill of making a surprising discovery when he
came to realize that the primitive culture of his African ancestors, of
which a musical echo had survived the shock of enslavement and trans¬
plantation to a New World, was spiritually akin to all the non-Western
higher cultures, and to the pristine higher culture of the Western World
itself, in virtue of its having preserved a spiritual integrity which a Late
Modern Western secularized culture had deliberately abandoned.

'Years ago, I would not have said—as I do now—that I am proud to be
a Negro. I did not know that there was anything to be proud about. Since
then I have made many discoveries.

'They began when I was still a student. I came in contact with Russians
at college. I heard them sing their native songs and was struck by their
likeness to Negro music. What was wrong with our despised music if it
was akin to the revered Russian ? Had we a value that had been passed
by? Were the outcast Negroes, who were struggling to assimilate frag¬
ments of the unsympathetic cultures of the West, really akin to the great
cultures of the East ? It was a fascinating thought.

‘I began to make experiments. I found that I—a Negro—could sing
Russian songs like a native. I, who had to make the greatest effort to
master French and German, spoke Russian in six months with a perfect
accent, and am now finding it almost as easy to master Chinese. I dis¬
covered that this was because the African languages—thought to be
primitive because monosyllabic—had exactly the same basic structure as
Chinese. I found that Chinese poems which cannot be rendered in Eng¬
lish would translate perfectly into African. I found the African way of
thinking in symbols was also the way of the great Chinese thinkers. I found
that scientists had been puzzled by the strange similarity between ancient
African and Chinese art. I found that I, who lacked feeling for the Eng¬
lish language later than Shakespeare, met Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi,
Lao-tsze, and Confucius on common ground. I understood them. I found
myself completely at home with their compatriots.

'Now there is an important thought here. With the coming of the
Renaissance something happened to Europe. Before then the art, the

* See pp. 405-6, above.

* See III. lii. 131 and 247, n. i, and V. v. 134-5 snd 482-3.

* The portents of vulgarity and barbarism in Art have been noticed in V. v. 480-3.

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 501

literature, the music were akin to Asiatic cultures. With the Renaissance,
Reason and Intellect were placed above Intuition and Feeling. The result
has been a race which conquered Nature and now rules the World. But
the art of that race has paid the price. As Science has advanced, the art
standards of the West have steadily declined. Intellectualised art grows
tenuous, sterile.

‘This is a serious thought. To what end does the West rule the World
if all art dies? Jesus, the Eastern, was right. “What shall it profit a man
if he gain the whole World and lose his own soul ?” ’’

In this intuition of the malady which a Late Modern Western Society
had inflicted on itself, Paul Robeson was putting his finger on the differ¬
ence between an integrated and a disintegrated culture, and he had
perceived that the structural and the spiritual disintegration of culture
are two aspects of a single process. Some of the phenomena of culture-
disintegration within the bosom of a single society have been examined
in this Study already ; 1 we have now to inquire how the difference be¬
tween the two diverse possible states of a culture affects the transmission
of culture-rays from one body social to another, and here we have to
distinguish between several different possible cultural situations in
which an encounter between contemporaries may take place. Both
parties to the encounter may be in a state of integration, or both in a state
of disintegration, or one in the one state and the other in the other state,
at the time when the encounter takes place, and we shall find that the
difference between these several diverse sets of circumstances is apt to
be reflected in a corresponding difference in the outcome in the different
cases. We shall also find that, whatever may be the respective states of
the two colliding cultures at the time when their encounter occurs, the
collision itself is apt to produce a disruptive effect of its own on both
the structure of the impinging culture-missile and the fabric of the
smitten body social if this collision results, not in a repulse of the attack,
but in a penetration of the assaulted party’s defences.

The Conduciveness of Cultural Disintegration to Cultural Intercourse

When the impinging culture is in a state of integration, and a fortiori
when the state of the smitten body social is the same, the outcome of the
collision is apt to be one or other of two opposite extremes. The imping¬
ing culture will either rebound from the surface of the smitten body
without having succeeded in penetrating it at all, or it will penetrate it
with such effect as to succeed in assimilating it. In the light of our simile
of the flint, this extreme diversity of the two possible results can be seen
to arise from a proportionately extreme variability in the temper and
conduct of the party that is taking the initiative. This original agent in
the encounter may deliver to his neighbour the unknapped flint that he
holds in his hand either by hurling it at him as a missile or by offering
it to him as a gift. If he employs his philosopher’s stone as an offensive
weapon, its mass and weight may bruise his victim’s body or even crack
his skull, but the very size of the unknapped flint and the roundness of

1 Robeson, Paul, in The Daily Herald, 5th January, 1935, p. 8, cols. 5-6.

* In V. v and vi.

502 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
its contours in its pristine state make it unlikely that it will pierce the
bone and lodge itself in the brain like David’s pebble; and the unlikeli¬
hood of this happening will be the greater if the assaulted body social’s
fabric is also in an integrated state; for in this state it will present a com¬
pact and close-grained front capable of withstanding the impact even of
a missile that has been artificially sharpened to a deadly point; and an
assaulted body social that is clothed in this spiritual armour may prove
in consequence to be sufficiently master of the situation to be able to
reject any alien culture-element which it does not feel itself able to
metabolize and assimilate. ‘No reception without metabolization’ is a
healthily integrated society’s war-cry in answer to the challenge of a cul¬
tural assault; and it would be difficult to find an instance of the success¬
ful penetration of a healthily integrated society by an assailant on any
terms that were not of the assaulted party’s own choosing.

Even when it is sufficiently master of the situation arising from an
encounter to dictate its own terms, an integrated civilization does not
readily accept a culture-element from an alien civilization; and, on the
rare occasions when it allows itself to be receptive, the source of the
alien culture-element that it does then receive will be found to be a
radioactive civilization that is already in disintegration more often than
one that is still in the recipient’s own state of cultural integrity. This is,
of course, what we should expect in the light of our observation that the
state of a radioactive body social’s fabric is reproduced in the texture of
the culture-rays emitted by it at the time ; 1 for this means that a ray
emanating from an already disintegrated body social will have been
decomposed before issuing from its source, and a fortiori before imping¬
ing on its target, so that the recipient will have found the preliminary
task of splitting the impinging integral ray into its constituent elemental
rays already performed for him, and will find the subsequent task of
selection proportionately facilitated, whereas he will have to carry out
both these successive tasks for himself if he is to give admittance to any
culture-elements emanating from a radioactive society that is still in
a state of integration and that is therefore still emitting its radiation in
an integral form.

As a classic example of the rare phenomenon of the transmission of
a culture-clement from one integral body social to another, we may cite
the reception of the special Calabrian variety of Eastern Orthodox
Christian monasticism by Western Christendom at the turn of‘the
tenth and eleventh centuries of the Christian Era , 2 when the model
monastery established at Grottafcrrata by a Basilian Saint Nilus on an
invitation from the Holy See became one of the sources of inspiration
for an already active indigenous Western Cluniac movement towards a
reform of the monastic life in the Western Christian World. A contem¬
porary second example of the same phenomenon is the reception at
Venice of the Byzantine visual arts of architecture and mosaic in the
building and decoration of Saint Mark’s—though in this case the meta¬
bolization and assimilation of the imported culture-elements was less

* See p. 4Q5, above.

* See IV. iv. 357 and 600.

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 503
thorough-going than the spiritual metamorphosis through which an
inspiration from Calabria was taken to heart at Cluny.

The local acclimatization of a Byzantine style of architecture in a
Western cultural environment at Venice in the tenth and eleventh
centuries dwindles, of course, into a mere curiosity of history by com¬
parison with the creation, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of
a new Western style that was at once distinctive and oecumenical when
a traditional Western Romanesque architecture gave birth to a revolu¬
tionary ‘Gothic’ architecture sired by an Armenian school whose
masterpieces had caught the imagination of Western Crusaders; and
we may compare this effect of an alien inspiration on the history of
architecture in Western Christendom with the effect produced on the
history of the Hellenic art of sculpture in the round in the seventh and
sixth centuries b.c. by the impact of an Egyptiac style on the imagination
of Hellenic mercenary soldiers and commercial travellers in the Nile
Valley. We must note, however, that, while, in our two last-cited
examples, as in our two first, the recipient societies were both still in a
state of integration at the time as far as we can see, the radioactive
societies in these two last cases were neither of them likewise in the
same state. In contrast to the Orthodox Christian Society at the time
when a monastic and an architectural inspiration were accepted from it
by a contemporary Western Christendom, the societies that had pro¬
duced the Armenian style of architecture and the Egyptiac style of
sculpture were, both of them, not merely in course of disintegration, as,
for instance, the Syriac and the Indie Society were at the time when
elements derived from them were perhaps adopted, metabolized, and
assimilated by a still integrated contemporary Hellenic Society which was
creating ‘a fancy religion’ for itself in the shape of Orphism. 1 At the
dates here in question, the Armenian and Egyptiac societies were both
in a pathological after-state of petrifaction, and this was the condition
in which they exerted their profound cultural influence on an integral
Western Christian and an integral Hellenic Society respectively. The
radioactive Armenian community was one fragment of a Monophysitc
‘fossil’ of an already extinct Syriac Society; 2 the radioactive Egyptiac
Society was a ‘Tithonus’. 1

With this clue in our hands, we may now be able to discern the reason
why the Absolute Monarchy that was the master-institution in the
political life of Eastern Orthodox Christendom was first rejected, and
afterwards accepted, by a Western Christian sister society. On these two
occasions the institution in question was the same, and on both occasions
Western Christendom was in the same state of integration. The differ¬
ence between the two situations, which may account for the difference
between the two Western reactions to the impact of the same Byzantine
culture-arrow, was a difference in the state of the radioactive Orthodox
Christian Society on the first occasion and on the second. At the time
when the Western World rejected the attempt of the Saxon 'Holy
Roman Emperors’ Otto II and Otto III (imperabant a.d. 973-1002) to
acclimatize the Byzantine absolute authoritarian state on Western soil,

» See V. v. 84-87 and X. ix. 738-40- 2 See I. i. 35. » See VI. vii. 47 - 5 *-

504 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION

the Orthodox Christian Society was still in a state of integration in
which the divers elements constituting its culture-pattern were so closely
knit together that it would have been difficult for another society to
accept any one of these alien Orthodox Christian culture-elements
without exposing itself to the risk of seeing its own distinctive indigenous
culture-pattern obliterated by the descent of a cultural avalanche which
would be precipitated by the movement of a single boulder in a moraine
where the boulders were bound all to stand or fall together. On the
other hand, by the time when the Byzantine absolute authoritarian state
was taken over by the Western architects of a Norman successor-state
of the East Roman Empire in Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily in order to be
transmitted through the agency of Frederick II Hohenstaufen to his
immediate heirs, the parochial North Italian despots of the Late
Medieval Age of Western history—and, in their version of it, to become
the inspiration of the absolute monarchies of an Early Modern Western
World'—the Orthodox Christian Society from which this now acceptable
exotic institution was derived was already in a state of disintegration;
and this meant that a culture-element which, in the same society’s
antecedent state, had been inextricably interwoven with all the other
constituent elements in an integrated culture-pattern was now an
isolated piece of casual wreckage which could be picked up and appro¬
priated without its necessarily bringing in its train the other ship’s
timbers to which this plank had been clamped before the blows of wind
and wave had prised asunder what the shipwright’s art had joined
together.

These instances indicate that an integrated body social which comes
under a bombardment of cultural radiation emanating from another
society is apt to reject any element originating in this alien source which
it is not able to take on its own terms; and this means that its resistance
is likely to be particularly stubborn when the alien culture-ray that
impinges on the assaulted body social’s close-grained fabric is not an
elemental one but is an integral shaft which is demanding to be taken or
left as a whole, without picking or choosing.

There are, it is true, historic examples of the gracious spectacle of the
voluntary reception of an integral culture that has been offered by
a neighbour as a gift instead of being inflicted by an aggressor on a victim.
In the growth-stage of the history of the Hellenic Civilization we can
observe Hellenism being accepted by ci-devant primitive peoples on the
expanding fringes of the Hellenic World of the day—Lydians and
Phrygians in the hinterland of Continental Asiatic Greece; Aetolians and
Epirots and Macedonians in the hinterland of Continental European
Greece; and Sicels, Messapians, Calabrians, Apulians, and Latins in
a new world west of the Straits of Otranto. Hellenism also achieved the
miracle of winning the allegiance of representatives of a society of its
own species. The Etruscan transmarine pioneers of the Hittite Civiliza¬
tion became converts to the Hellenic Civilization before the close of its
pre-Alexandrine Age, while in the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic
history the cradle of the Hittite Society in Eastern Anatolia was likewise
* See VII. vii. 537-9 and X. ix. 97-103.

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE

SOS

gradually Hellenized in the course of six or seven centuries ending in the
generation of the Cappadocian Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The bloodless triumphs of Hellenism over primitive peoples were
emulated by Orthodox Christendom when it successively converted
the Georgians, the Alans, the barbarian Slav intruders into the Balkan
Peninsula, the Bulgars, and the Russians; and they were emulated by
Western Christendom when it converted the Frankish barbarians in the
fifth century of the Christian Era, the English in the sixth, the Frisians,
Hessians, Bavarians, and Thuringians in the eighth , 1 and the Poles,
Magyars, and Croats at the turn of the tenth and the eleventh. Western
Christendom also won the allegiance of two societies of its own species;
and, whatever may be our assessment of the roles respectively played by
the physical force of coercion and by the spiritual force of attraction in
a Latin Christendom’s capture of the Far Western Christendom of ‘the
Celtic Fringe ’, 1 it is indisputable that the Scandinavian World was
captivated by a process of entirely peaceful penetration . 1

This list of voluntary conversions is not unimpressive as far as it goes ; 4
but, if w'e are to see the historic examples of this social phenomenon in
true proportion, we must remind ourselves of three considerations that
take some of the light out of this at first sight rather idyllic picture. One
of these second thoughts is that the number of known instances of this
happy denouement of an encounter between contemporaries was very
small by comparison with the total number of known instances of such
encounters; another consideration is that a majority of the peoples
known to have voluntarily adopted an alien culture in its integral form
had been either primitives or barbarians in the penumbra of a civiliza¬
tion; and it has also to be noted that, in the rare cases in which the
integral culture of a civilization had been adopted unreservedly by
representatives of a society of its own species, these relatively highly
cultivated converts all proved to have been in some abnormally weak
position, of one kind or another, at the time when their conversion
took place.

The Etruscans, for example, were an overseas outpost of a continental
society who had been cut off from the main body of their kith and kin by
their Hellenic competitors’ feat of planting themselves astride all the
maritime lines of communication between the west coast of Italy and the
south coast of Anatolia; and the subsequent conversion of the Etruscans
to Hellenism thus occurred in ‘geopolitical’ circumstances in which the
converts’ only alternative to accepting Hellenism was to succumb to it.
Moreover, by comparison with their Hellenic contemporaries, the
Etruscans laboured from the outset under the handicap of being the
children of a society which had been prematurely shattered by the blast
of a post-Minoan Volkerwanderung. The crippling effect of this peculiar

* Sec II. ii. 336. * See II. ii. 522-40. > See II. ii. 340-60.

* It would be rash to attempt to extend it by including in it any of the case* of the
reception of the Modem Western culture by contemporary non-Western societies; for
none of these current encounters with the Modem West had yet worked itself out to its
denouement at the time of writing, and therefore at that date it was impossible to be sure
that even the most sensational apparent instance of successful Westernization would not
prove in the event to have been delusively ephemeral.

5 o6 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
calamity must be presumed to have played its part in moving the
Etruscans to adopt an alien culture in place of their Hittite social heritage
—unless we have the hardihood to commit ourselves to the paradoxical
alternative recourse of writing off as a mere coincidence the remarkable
fact that the continental survivors of a shattered Hittite Society appear,
side by side with their transmarine colonists in Etruria, in the strildngly
short muster role of representatives of civilizations that had voluntarily
adopted an integral alien culture in its entirety. Indeed, in this list they
appear twice over; for in another context 1 we have already observed that
the Hellcnization of the Continental Refugee Hittites on the north-west
flanks of Taurus and Antitaurus in the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic
history had been anticipated by the progressive captivation of their
fellow refugees on the south-eastern flanks of the same mountain
fastnesses by the Syriac culture through the agency of the Aramaic
language and alphabet. 2

The crippling effect of the disaster by which the Hittite Society was
overtaken at the turn of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.c. has
a counterpart in the history of one branch of one of the two nascent
civilizations that were successfully absorbed by an adolescent Latin
Western Christendom. The Celtic Christians in Britain had had their
spirit broken by an avalanche of pagan English barbarian invasion
before they tardily and reluctantly accepted the Latin Christian culture
in the act of acknowledging the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Roman
See. On the other hand the Britons’ disheartening experience, which
may have predisposed them to renounce their ambition to bring to
flower a distinctive culture of their own, was not shared by Irish Celtic
Christians who had divided the spoils of a derelict Roman province in
Britain with the pagan barbarian English invaders from the Continent;
and the prelude to the voluntary incorporation of a pagan Scandinavian
World into the body social of a Latin Western Christendom was a fresh
barbarian Volkcrwandcrung in which the Vikings took the offensive with
such formidable effect that the victimized society which was eventually
to captivate these assailants had first to fight for its existence with its
back to the wall.

This encounter between ‘the heroes of Asgard’ and ‘the Apostle at
Rome’ would seem to be a clear case of the voluntary reception of an
integral alien civilization by representatives of another society of the
same species in circumstances in which the act of cultural conversion
cannot be accounted for by any antecedent trauma in the converted
society’s psychic history. But a unique event, however notable in itself,
goes to prove the rule to which it is an exception rather than the rule of
which it would remain the solitary instance if rules could ever be estab-

• See pp. 445-6, above.

1 The long-continuing cultural intercourse between Hittites and Aramaeans that
eventually resulted in the reception of a Syriac culture by the Hittite communities south¬
east of Taurus and Antitaurus had begun as early as the fourteenth century b.c., when
Northern Syria had been invaded simultaneously by the Hittites from the Anatolian
Plateau and by the Aramaeans from the North Arabian Steppe; but the archaeological
evidence for the Syriac culture’s establishment of its ascendancy over the Hittite culture
in this region does not begin to present itself before the turn of the ninth and eighth
centuries B.C. (see Cavaignac, E.: Lt Problimt Hittite (Paris 1936, Leroux), p. 166).

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 507
lished legitimately on the strength of a single exemplification. In the field
of encounters between contemporaries in which both parties arc societies
of the species that we have labelled ‘civilizations’, and even in the wider
field in which the ‘agent’s’ role is played by a civilization and the ‘re¬
agent’s’ role by a primitive or semi-primitive society, an Orpheus capti¬
vating all fellow creatures within earshot by the enchanting harmony of
his heavenly music 1 is a rare figure by comparison with a Charlemagne
forcibly baptizing the captives of his bow and spear or an Awrangzib
morally alienating intended victims who have proved more than a match
for him on the battlefield. The rule at which we thus arrive inductively
proves to be that normally an encounter between contemporaries is
culturally sterile even when one party, and a fortiori when either party,
is in a healthy state of cultural integration; and the historical evidence
likewise bears out the converse ‘law’ that a state of cultural disintegration
is favourable to cultural intercourse, 2 and most favourable of all when it
is the state of both parties to the encounter and when on both sides it
has gone to extremes. 3

This will be found to have been the social setting of most of the
encounters, surveyed in earlier chapters of this Part, 4 which have taken
the dramatic form of action evoking reaction and thereby producing a
peripeteia. In terms of our simile of the flint it is easy to see that, when
the knapper has split the stone by striking off flakes from the core, and
when he has chipped his flakes into slim sharp arrow heads, these tooled
fragments will travel faster and farther, and will lodge themselves deeper
in their target when shot from a bow, than the unsplit stone when hurled
by hand. The radiation of a radioactive body social is, in fact, more apt
to make an impression on an alien body on which it impinges if the emit¬
ting body is in disintegration than if it is still in its state of pristine
integrity; and, if we may infer that successfully radioactive societies will
be found to be already in disintegration as a rule, we shall have laid our
finger on at least one of the reasons why the process of radiation-and-
rcception is apt to work itself out piecemeal over a protracted Time-span;
for in previous contexts 5 we have already noticed that the divers consti¬
tuent elements of a culture have different specific velocities, ranges, and
penetrative powers when they are in process of transmission from an
emitting to a receiving body social, and that each ‘arrow’ (if we think in
terms of Palaeolithic technology) or each elemental ray (if we think in
terms of Modern Western optics) will take its own natural course as soon

* See IV. iv. 124-6 and 131-2, and V. v. 2:0-13 and 231.

* We have already stumbled on this ‘law’ at an earlier point in this Study (in III.
iii. 128-54), where we have been led to formulate it as an explanation of the empirically
demonstrable fact that the increasing command over a human environment which is
registered in the geographical expansion of a civilization at the expense of neighbouring
societies proves, not only not to be n criterion of social growth, but to be, perhaps more
often that not, a symptom of social disintegration.

J In IV. iv. 1:5-19 we have already come to the conclusion that there is no known
instance of a civilization’s breaking down and disintegrating in which the cause of the
breakdown can be demonstrated to have been a blow struck by some other party and not
some suicidal act on the part of the broken-down society- itself. If this conclusion holds
good in cases in which the aggressor society has been a civilization, it applies a fortiori
to cases in which the domain of a universal state has been overrun by transfrontier bar¬
barians—as we have observed in I. i. 58-60 and in Part VIII, painm. above.

4 On pp. 106-453, above. » In III. iii. 152; IV. iv. 57; and V. v. 199-200.

5 o8 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
as it has been released from its wedlock with the core in the unsplit
stone or with the rest of the elemental rays in an integral ray of white
light.

Decomposition through Diffraction

This piecemeal transmission of the constituent elements of a culture
cannot, however, be explained solely as an effect of a previous structural
disintegration of the radioactive body whose fabric, whatever its state
may happen to be, is reproduced in the texture of its effluent culture-
rays, nor again solely as an effect of the receiving body social’s being like¬
wise in a state of structural disintegration—and therefore being more
readily susceptible to penetration by an intrusive alien culture—at the
time when it is exposed to the radioactive culture’s impact. In the
knapping of the flint or the diffraction of the ray of white light—which¬
ever of the two similes we may prefer to employ—there must also be
some other cause at work; for, if a spontaneous antecedent disintegra¬
tion of the culture-pattern of one party or both parties to the encounter
were the only possible cause of this phenomenon of knapping or diffrac¬
tion, it would be impossible to understand why a culture should not be
transmitted integrally and instantaneously in cases, like that of the con¬
version of the Scandinavians to the Latin Christian culture, in which the
culture-pattern of both the parties to the transaction was in an integral
state at the time when the act of conversion took place. Both in this case,
however, and in that of the conversion of the Etruscans to Hellenism—
an episode in which the Hellenic party, at any rate, was still in a state of
cultural integration, whatever may have been the state of the Etruscans
at the time—we find that, as a matter of historical fact, the migratory
culture was transmitted, as in other cases, piecemeal and not all at one
delivery, with the consequence that, in these cases likewise, the process
of transmission took an appreciable time to work itself out. We must
conclude that, in such cases at any rate, some other cause must have
been operative; and, if we can identify this other cause, we shall have to
allow for the possibility that it may have played some part likewise in
those other piecemeal and protracted transmissions of culture in which
the disintegrated state of the culture-pattern of the two parties, or of
one of them, is the explanation that first leaps to the eye.

A further pursuit of our optical simile may help us to bring to light
this latent other cause of the decomposition of culture in the course of its
transmission. In the Physical Universe our occasional perception of the
diverse elemental colours of the spectrum, which in white light arc
fused together into so perfect a unity that they arc not only inextricable
but arc indistinguishable, is not the effect of a decomposition of light
that has taken place in the body of the Sun before the ray which we per¬
ceive in this decomposed state has left its solar source and has impinged
on this planet. The reason why, in human visual experience, white
light is the normal epiphany of light and the colour-gamut of the spec¬
trum is an exceptional spectacle is because the light that reaches us is in
fact emitted from the Sun in rays that are originally integral. The colour-
gamut of the spectrum becomes visible to us only when an integral shaft

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 509
of sunlight happens to strike a terrestrial target of a particular consistency
—a shower of rain or a block of crystal—at a particular angle at which
the ray is able to penetrate this particular material obstacle to its farther
advance at the cost of being diffracted into its constituent elements by
the resistance of the foreign body. The shock of the integral ray’s impact
from this angle on a target of this texture shakes the precariously inte¬
grated bundle of elemental rays apart into a ‘spectrum’ that is so called
because, in it, each primary colour is sorted out from all the rest, with
the result that each of the constituents of the original ray of sunlight
becomes visible in and by itself at the price of the effacement of the
white light that had been the visual effect of the elemental rays’ now
dissolved association.

If we retransposc our perilously illuminating physical simile into
human terms, we shall find no difficulty in seeing why, in the realm of
human encounters, the phenomenon of culture-diffraction should be
produced by the shock inflicted on a body social by the impact of an
alien culture-ray. The intrusion of any alien cultural clement into the
life of any society, in whatever state of life it may happen to be at the
time, is manifestly a dangerously disruptive, and therefore a painfully
harassing, experience for the reason that a state of integration is, as we
have seen, the normal condition of a healthy cultural life, so that even a
society which has already spontaneously fallen into disintegration, and
has perhaps since travelled far along this road, before being smitten by
the alien culture-ray’s impact, will shrink from exposing itself wantonly
to this foreign complication of a domestic situation that has already got
out of hand. In fact, an assaulted society will never welcome its assailant’s
culture with open arms or promptly abandon its own indigenous social
heritage wholesale in order to substitute for it the importunately obtru¬
sive alien culture-pattern all of a piece in an instantaneous act of deliber¬
ate self-transformation. The victim’s immediate impulse (though, as we
shall see, 1 not always his last, as well as first, resort) will be to put up an
anxiously obstinate resistance, fight a succession of rear-guard actions,
and swallow the exotic potion that is being forced down his throat in a
series of minimum doses, in the reluctant spirit of a child compelled to
take nasty medicine. Nothing but a course of disagreeable and disillusion¬
ing experience will teach this recalcitrant patient—if he ever learns the
lesson at all—that he has chosen the most unpleasant and most in¬
expedient way of responding to a challenge which he cannot elude.

A classical example of this initial negative reaction of the victim of
a cultural assault is the long-drawn-out first chapter in the Ottoman
Turks’ response to the challenge of the turn in the tide of their perennial
warfare with the Western World. As we have seen, 2 they allowed the
best part of a century to pass without taking any drastic steps after they
had been warned of their danger by their signally disastrous defeat in
the Great Turco-Frankish War of a . d . 1682-99; and, when they were
stung into action at last by the still more disastrous and much more
humiliating experience of being defeated by a Westernizing Orthodox
Christian Power in the Great Turco-Russian War of a . d . 1768-74, they

* Onpp. 580-613, below. J On pp. 232-8, above. See also p. 557, n. 4, below.

5 X 0 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
stultified their own efforts for the best part of another century and a half
by clinging to the impracticable policy of attempting to adopt the
Modern Western art of war without simultaneously accepting any of
those non-military Modem Western institutions that were in fact the
indispensable conditions of Modern Western military efficiency. It
required a third shock—the military invasion of their Anatolian home¬
land by their own ci-devant ra'iyeh, the Morcot and Rumelian Greeks, in
a.d. 1919—to induce the Turks at last to follow a leader who put it to
them that their only chance of survival now lay in embracing the
Modern Western Civilization with enthusiasm and remoulding their
way of life to fit this alien culture-pattern without reservations. Atatvirk
addressed his saving message to his countrymen with assurance and
authority because he had taken the measure of a disintegrating society's
defencelessness against cultural aggression. When the living target of
culture-arrows has lost the natural armour constituted by a closely in¬
tegrated social fabric, its skin will offer an opening at every pore for an
arrow-head to insert itself, and the naked body will find itself exposed to
penetration on terms that will be of its assailant’s setting, and not of its
own.

In the first stage, however, of a disintegrating society's encounter with
a radioactive alien culture the negative reaction of the eighteenth-century
and nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish conservatives seems to be the
mle. As further illustrations of this prevalent initial attitude we may cite
the reluctance notoriously shown by the statesmen of a Roman Common¬
wealth in a post-Hannibalic Age to make annexations of territory belong¬
ing to the domains of any of the Hellenic Civilization’s Oriental
neighbours, though these domains were then lying at the mercy of a Roman
Power which had succeeded in overthrowing its sole really formidable
competitor. A fortiori, these post-Hannibalic Roman statesmen were
chary of bringing those alien worlds within Rome’s own walls by opening
her gates to the importation, manumission, and enfranchisement of
Oriental slaves, and they were particularly vigilant to repress or, as a pis
alter, to sterilize, any immigrant Oriental religions, or at all events never
to license them without having first done their best to denature them by
insisting that they should not present themselves for admission till they
had clothed themselves in an Hellenic wedding-garment. 1

A Hittite worship of Cybele, an Egyptiac worship of Isis, an Iranian
Syriac Mithraism, and a Palestinian Syriac Christianity all duly com¬
mended themselves to the main body of the Hellenic Society within the
frontiers of the Roman Empire by assuming in their outward show the
appealingly familiar style of Hellenic visual art, and even the Far
Eastern outposts of Hellenism in Bactria and India that had been isolated
by the rise of an intervening Arsacid Power and had fallen under Kushan
rule were prospective converts of sufficient importance to make it worth
while for an Indie Mah 5 y 5 na to resort to the same device of visual
Hellenization in order to catch the eye of an Hellenic diaspord. West of
Euphrates the Syriac missionary religion Christianity and the Babylonic
missionary religion Astrology carried the propitiatory process of self-
1 Matt. xxii. xi-14.

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 511

Hellenization a stage farther by translating their ideas and ideals into
terms of Hellenic science and philosophy 1 instead of being content
merely to lay a veneer of Hellenism over their visual surface; and it is
significant that, in the competition between Oriental religions for the
conversion of the main body of the Hellenic World in the Imperial
Age, the victory should eventually have been won by the competitor
that had gone to the greatest lengths in Hcllenizing itself and thereby
turning the flank of the resistance which even a disintegrating Hellenic
Society was still prone to offer to the reception of any alien culture-
element that was conspicuously exotic.

Without seeking to anticipate the eventual answer to the enigmatic
question whether, at the time of writing, the Western Civilization was
already in disintegration or was still in course of growth, we may cite, as
evidence relevant to our present inquiry, the unquestionable fact that
in the Late Modern and the Early post-Modern Age of Western history
a Roman reluctance to incorporate culturally alien territories or to open
the gates to immigrant alien bodies or ideas had been displayed by the
governments of two Western Great Powers.

The Hapsburg Monarchy was actually led to make the great refusal
of its manifest destiny, and thereby condemn itself to an eventual catas¬
trophic liquidation, by its reluctance to add to the numbers of the ex-
Ottoman Orthodox Christians under Hapsburg rule when once the
Roman Church had reached the limits of its power to transmute
Eastern Orthodox Christians into Roman Catholics through the alchemy
of the statesmanlike institution of uniate churches. Just two hundred
years before the dissolution of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy in
a.d. 1918, it had looked, on the morrow of the peace-settlement of
Passarowitz, as if the whole of the Rumeliot main body of Ottoman
Orthodox Christendom were on the point of passing under Hapsburg
rule; yet Viennese statesmanship acquiesced in a.d. 1739 in the retro¬
cession to Turkey of the Serbian and Wallachian portions of the Otto¬
man territory acquired by the Monarchy in a . d . 1718; it let slip its
opportunity of retrieving this loss in a.d. 1788-91 ; 2 and thereafter at the
eleventh hour, when a Hapsburg Monarchy that had suffered humiliat¬
ing defeats at Serb as well as Russian hands in the opening phase of the
General War of a.d. 1914-18 was taken up for an unearned and unsoli¬
cited ride in the cab of a momentarily victorious Hohenzollern ally’s
triumphal steam-roller, the governments at Vienna and Budapest were
gravely embarrassed by the ironical brilliance of a temporary political
situation in which the disposal of Montenegro, Serbia, and Rumania
momentarily lay in the hands of the Central Powers. To leave these
conquered ex-Ottoman Orthodox Christian enemy states independent
would mean stultifying the conqueror’s victory by leaving in existence
so many transfrontier bases of operations for a resumption of pre-war
irredentist nationalist movements among the Hapsburg Monarchy’s
own Jugoslav and Rumanian subjects. On the other hand, to annex the
conquered territories would mean undermining the political hegemony
of a German and a Magyar ‘ascendancy’ in what might prove to be
« See V. v. 367 and 539, and VII. vii. 470-6. J See II. ii. 180.

512 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
a more dangerous way by changing the Monarchy's internal balance of
national forces to the subject nationalities’ advantage. During the years
a.d. 1915-18 Austro-Hungarian statesmanship was tormented by the
nightmare of this insoluble problem till it was put out of its agony by
the merciful hand of Death.

The General War of a . d . 1914-18, which precipitated the dissolution
of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, brought the United States face
to face with the problem that had eventually defeated Hapsburg states¬
manship.

During the hundred years ending in a.d. 1914 an ever more rapidly
mounting flood of immigration from the Old World had provided the
American people with the copious reinforcements of its man-power
that were required for the achievement of its titanic enterprise of
mastering a virgin island of almost continental dimensions; but the
blithely indiscriminate welcome that had been given to this inflow of
immigration into North America during the first chapter of the story
had begun to be qualified by some disquiet in American hearts, and
consequent reservation in American minds, when, at about the turn of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the composition of the inpouring
stream had rather suddenly changed and had at the same time given
premonitory indications of further, still more radical, changes that
might be expected at no distant future date if the flood-waters w-cre not
promptly brought under rigorous governmental control. The first spate
of nineteenth-century immigrants had come for the most part from those
North-West European countries whose colonists had peopled the
Atlantic seaboard of North America before its attainment of political
independence; but in the years a.d. 1880-93 a tributary stream had
begun to flow from Italy, the Hapsburg Monarchy, and the Russian
Empire, and in the years a.d. 1898-1914, in which the total volume of
immigration was at its maximum, this parvenu and outlandish South and
East European contingent greatly outnumbered the dwindling rear-guard
of a familiar and acceptable North-West European column of route. 1

The distinctive difference between these two diverse streams of latter-
day immigration that moved the American people to adopt a discrimina¬
tory attitude was not, of course, the mere difference in their geographical
provenance, but was the difference in their cultural complexion which
this difference of provenance implied. A significant negative common
characteristic of all units in the new contingent was the non-Western
origin of their native cultural traditions ;* and this pacific invasion of the

x See Toynbee, A. J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1924 (London 1926, Milford),
pp. 8S-89.

1 Within the boundaries of all the three states in the Old World from which the bulk
of this new contingent of immigrants into the United States was drawn there were, of
course, populations that were Western in their culture; but the majority even of these
were representatives of the Roman Catholic branch of the Western Christian family,
and not of the Protestant branch that had been predominant in the United States so
far, and a majority of the Italian Roman Catholic immigrants in those years were
Neapolitans and Sicilians, who still remained crypto-Byzantines even after a nine
hundred years’ experience of on association with Western Christendom into which they
had been conscripted originally by a Norman military conquest. The immigrants from
the Danubian Hapsburg and the Russian Empire included undisguised Byzantines, as
well as Jews.

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 513

United States by non-Westem immigrants whose exotic character was
partially concealed under the misleading meaningless label ‘European’
was already threatening to attract reinforcements from other regions of
the Old World whose inhabitants’ ‘un-American way of life’ was adver¬
tised by an arbitrary convention that labelled these other non-Western
peoples 'Asiatics’. 1

This new threat which the old institution of immigration had thus
come to present to the integrity of the American people’s native Western
way of life led the United States to follow up the enactment of a Chinese
Exclusion Law on the 6th May, 1882, 2 and the establishment of an
‘Asiatic Barred Zone’ in an act of the 5th February, 1917, 3 by passing
the two momentous general Immigration Restriction Acts that came
into force respectively on the 3rd June, 1921, and on the rst July, 1924. 4
The Act of 1924 was designed not merely to restrict the total number of
immigrants but to discriminate, within this total, in favour of applicants
from North-West European countries. 5 The annual quotas assigned to
countries from which a restricted flow of immigration was still permitted
were governed by a formula that would tell against applicants of South
and East European provenance; the immigration of Orientals was
banned altogether; 6 and the Senate at Washington insisted 7 on confirm¬
ing the application of this Oriental Exclusion Clause in the Immigration
Act of a.d. 1924 to applicants from Japan, in lieu of ‘the Gentleman’s
Agreement’ that had governed the entry of Japanese nationals into the
United States since a.d. 1907. 5

By the year a.d. 1952 6 —by when it had become manifest in retrospect
that this change in United States immigration policy after the First
World War had played an appreciable part in the genesis of the Second
—the American people had succeeded at this price in checking the
cultural adulteration with which their body social had been threatened
through an influx of culturally alien immigrants, only to discover, like
the Romans before them, that the relatively easy recourse of physically
excluding alien bodies left them still face to face with the more baffling
problem of contending with alien ‘dangerous’ thoughts that had a knack
of making their way through the most efficiently drawn official ‘sanitary
cordon’ without requiring the services of any physical carrier. 'The
wind blowcth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof but
canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth.’ 10 If the twentieth-
century American policy of excluding, restricting, and ‘screening’
would-be immigrants, and re-educating and assimilating the applicants
who had qualified for admission, was a counterpart of the post-Hanni-
balic Roman policy of regulating the importation and manumission of

1 The unreality of the conventional partition of the Old World into a ‘Europe 1 and
an ‘Asia’ is exposed on pp. 708-29, below.

* Sec Toynbee, op. cit., p. 131. * See ibid., p. 90, n. 1.

* See ibid., pp. 93-97. 5 See ibid., pp. 97-99-

6 See ibid., p. 147- 7 See ibid., pp. i4$-59-

8 See ibid., pp. 135-8.

« The quota system introduced in the Act of a.d. 1924 was retained, while the dis¬
crimination on racial grounds, embodied in legislation hitherto in force, was abandoned
in form, but not in substance, in the McCarran-Waltcr Immigrati~n Act, which was
passed in the Senate at Washington, by a vote overriding President Truman’s veto, on
the 27th June, 1952. 10 John iii. 8.

B 2898. vW

5i4 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
slaves and confining the social and political enfranchisement of frccd-
men within limitations, the Psyche’s task of resisting the propagation of
Oriental religions, which defeated Roman statesmanship in a five-
hundred-years-long 'cold war' of attrition, 1 had its counterpart in a
spiritual conflict between 'the American way of life’ and the Russified
ci-devant Western heresy of Communism which, on the morrow of a
Second World War, was being waged in the bosom of the United States.
The non-military hostilities on this American home front in the rear of
the Bureau of Immigration’s elaborately fortified limes were even show¬
ing signs of taking forms that were familiar in the corresponding passages
of spiritual arms in the Imperial Age of Hellenic history.

The initial negative reaction on the victim’s part which we have been
observing in these American, Austro-Hungarian, Roman, and Ottoman
instances of it explains why an impinging alien culture is always
diffracted in the process of reception and is never swallowed whole at
one gulp even in those rare encounters between two integral cultures in
which the process finds its smoothest and quickest passage; and the
assaulted party’s defensive posture suggests another reason why, when
the divers elemental rays have thus been shaken loose from one another,
they prove, as they go their separate ways thenceforward, to have
different speeds, ranges, and penetrative powers. Their difference in
degree of prowess in these various respects is not due exclusively to a
specific difference in their intrinsic carrying-power; it is also to some
extent proportional to the difference in the degree of the resistance that
each of them evokes in the psyche of the party that is their unwilling
target.

Inverse Selection through Transmission

This further insight into the cause of the manifest differentiation in
the elemental culture-rays’ carrying power enables us, at the next step,
to detect the cause of one of the ‘laws’ governing the process of cultural
radiation-and-rcception which we have already seen at work. This ‘law’
runs to the effect that the carrying-power of a culture-element is pro¬
portional to the degree of its triviality and superficiality in the spiritual
hierarchy of cultural values. 1 It is a sinister law because it means that
a culture, when it goes into disintegration, has to pay for an enhancement
of the vigour of its radioactivity by reconciling itself to a deterioration
in the quality of the elements that it is transmitting. We may put the

E oint in terms of a homely simile by saying that the same amount of
utter is spread wider by the simple expedient of being spread thinner,
and by reminding ourselves that skim milk is more digestible than cream
for a rice-fed Cantonese or Japanese child that is being introduced for
the first time in its life to a novel diet of dairy-produce.

While the unwilling victim of cultural aggression will diffract an
impinging shaft of cultural radiation by repelling as many of its con-

1 The opening date of this Romano-Oriental ‘cold war’ may be found in the Senate’s
persecution of the Bacchants in t86 B.C., and its closing date in Galerius’a abandonment,
in A.D. 311, of the Diocletianic persecution of the Christians (sec II. ii. 2x5-16).

* See V. v. 200.

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 515

stituent elemental raj's as he finds it possible to repel in the first round
of the encounter, the elements that he will be least reluctant to admit,
if a total rejection of the aggressive alien culture proves to be beyond
his power, will be those elements that seem to him the least difficult or
least undesirable to assimilate; 1 and, when he finds himself driven to
give admittance to partially intractable elements under the pressure of
sheer force majeure for the sake of self-preservation—as, for instance,
when he has to face the necessity of mastering in some measure a
militarily superior assailant’s art of war—he will try to confine his
reception of these more or less intractable elements to a minimum. 1 For
this reason the process of culture-diffusion not only produces the
phenomenon of culture-diffraction but also differentiates between the
divers elements in the culture-spectrum of a diffracted culture-ray by
selecting for the speediest and farthest transmission those elements that
are of the lowest cultural value—a perverse operation of the principle
of natural selection that awards a premium of efficacy to spiritual
cheapness.

We have already observed 3 that, as soon as the divers constituent
elemental rays, or constituent flakes and core, of an impinging culture
have been released from their pristine association with one another, the
latent intrinsic difference between their respective carrying-powers
comes into play—whether the cause of their disentanglement happens
to be their impact on a diffracting target or happens to be the antecedent
disintegration of the culture-pattern of the radioactive body social from
which they have emanated. In this situation, in whatever way it may
have arisen, the economic elemental ray or arrow manifests the highest
carrying-power, the political arrow the next highest, and the untooled
residual core of the impinging culture the lowest carrying-power of all.
When this culture-core is split up in its turn by the successive dctach-

* The operation of this ‘law’ is, of course, most conspicuously manifest on the econo¬
mic plane. Materials that have a world-wide currency as objects of value—c.g. jewels,
gold, amber, jade, ivory, purple dye, spices, silk—may become objects of trade in the
commerce between one society and another without carrying with them any infection
of cultural influence or indeed any awareness of their original provenance (the lotus
classic us for this culturally uncompromising form of commerce is the account of the
transit of offerings from the land of 'the H>perboraeans’ to the Island of Delos, given
by Herodotus in Book IV, chap. 33); and even treasures in the shape of works of art
or specie may pas* physically from hand to hand without any concomitant transmission
of the culture displayed in the image and superscription on a coin or in the modelling
and decoration of a vase. Perhaps the most non-conductive of all treasures are pieces of
loot such as the emerald table which was taken by the Umayyad conquerors of the
Iberian Peninsula from Visigoths who, in their day, had token it from a pillaged Rome
(see Gibbon, E.: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, xxxi),
or the seven-branched golden candlestick which was first carried off from the Temple
of Jerusalem to Rome to figure in Titus’s triumphal procession and to be portrayed on
a bas-relief on his commemorative arch, and was then carried off from Rome to Car¬
thage when Rome was sacked by the Vandals in a.d. 455 (Gibbon, op. cit., chap, xxxvi).
Valuable materials and precious objects are received from alien hands with less reluc¬
tance than weapons, weapons less reluctantly than non-lcthal tools, treasures and tools
less reluctantly than staple commodities, and commodities of all kinds less reluctantly
than economic services—which are manifestly more compromising than material goods
because, unlike these, they cannot be accepted by one society from another without
personal contact with the alien hands by which they are being furnished.

2 When this negative reaction takes the form of hiring alien mercenary soldiers in
preference to educating a native personnel in an alien military technique, the attempt
to keep an alien culture at arm’s length is apt to defeat itself (see pp. 730-2, below).

s In III. iii. 152; IV. iv. 57; and V. v. 200.

516 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
ment of linguistic, intellectual, and artistic flakes from the core’s religious
nucleus, the respective intrinsic carrying-powers of these three cultural
flakes prove to be different likewise; and here again the premium on
spiritual cheapness prevails. The linguistic flake displays a higher
carrying-power than the intellectual, and the intellectual than the
artistic, while the religious nucleus of the culture-core has a lower
carrying-power than the detached cultural arrowheads.

This ‘law’ to the effect that the carrying-power of a culture-element
is in inverse ratio to its spiritual value has a corollary, propounded in an
earlier context, 1 which reads that the carrying-power of an integral
culture-ray or unsplit philosopher’s stone is equal to the average of the
respective intrinsic carrying-powers of its constituent elements. While
the political, as well as the economic, arrow in isolation proves to have
a higher carrying-power than the integral flint before the flakes have
been split off, the residual core displays a lower intrinsic carrying-power
in isolation than it enjoys when the more expeditious flakes arc still
attached to it. In virtue of the same law, the carrying-power of the
isolated religious nucleus of the culture-core proves to be lower than
that of the total core when still unsplit, while on the other hand the
carrying-powers of the artistic, intellectual, and linguistic flakes prove all
to be higher in isolation than the carrying-power of the core before these
superficial components have been detached from the religious nucleus.

Our ‘law’ and its corollary could both be illustrated from the history
of the radiation of the Western culture in the Modern Age. 1 In the
writer’s generation the diffusion of this Western culture on the political
as well as on the economic plane was already virtually world-wide,
whereas on the cultural plane its influence beyond the borders of its
homeland in the Western World itself was then still exotic and super¬
ficial, though by that date it had been radioactive for not less than four
and a half centuries. 1 Moreover, the form in which this Modern Western
culture—as distinct from Western economic and political technique—
had won its world-wide ascendancy, such as it was, had been a utili¬
tarian secular abstract consisting of a linguistic and an intellectual flake
which had served as ammunition for a Western Hercules’ bow after
having been detached from the religious nucleus and from a still un¬
detached artistic flake of an integral Western Christian culture’s core. 4

It was in this superficial form of a parcel of techniques, lingue franche,
and sciences that the Western culture had been adopted towards the end
of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era by Peter the Great in
Russia after it had been rejected in its integral unsccularized form at the
turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Hideyoshi and Ieyasu
in Japan; and its subsequent rejection in China likewise in the very
generation in which it was being adopted in Russia was a consequence
of the disastrous success achieved by the Franciscan missionaries of
a Tridentine Roman Catholic Christianity in China in foiling their
broader-minded and farther-sighted Jesuit colleagues’ attempt to avert

1 In V. v. aoo. * See xi, map 66.

3 This point has been noticed already in I. i. 30-31. See also Halccki, O.: The Limits
and Divisions of European History (London 1950, Sheed and Ward), p. 60.

4 See pp. 3 14 and 499-500, above.

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 517
in China the fate which had already cut short the propagation of an
integral Western Christian culture in Japan; for the Jesuit missionaries’
policy in China had been to offer this integral Christian form of the
Western way of life to Chinese minds and hearts in the most anodyne
version that could be devised by Christian representatives of the Modern
Western Civilization who were not prepared to follow their agnostic
contemporaries’ lead so far as to take the plunge into the unfathomably
deep waters of secularization. 1

The utilitarian secular abstract of the Modern Western culture which
did succeed in captivating eventually to some degree not only the
Russian, Serb, and Greek Orthodox Christians but also most of the rest
of Mankind, including the Japanese and Chinese themselves in the
next round of their continuing encounter with the West, 1 had found
a readier market abroad in a smoothly ‘processed’ French decoction
than in its racier but rougher English rawness; 1 and it had made its
way farthest, by the time of writing, not at the esoteric depth of its
revolutionary intellectual reinterpretation of the nature of the Physical
Universe, nor even at the less abstruse level to which the gospel of

1 This defeat of the Jesuit missionaries in China has been noticed in V. v. 365—7
and 539, and V. vL *3-24.

* In the mental vision of the writer of this Study the city of Shanghai stood, ever
since he had first set eyes on it in a.d. 1929, as the concrete symbol of the soullessncss of
this repulsively deconsecrated form in which the Western Civilization had made its
latter-day conquest of the non-Wcstern World. In this product of Western commerce
on Far Eastern ground a horrified Western observer could see a sight which was not to
be seen at the time on Western ground in either hemisphere. Here was a great city,
conjured up by Western enterprise and constructed and administered in the post-
Modem Western style, which was charged with all the dynamic material energy that
was coursing through the veins of a contemporary Chicago or Berlin or London or
Paris, without at the same time trailing even one wisp of the cloud of pristine Western
Christian spiritual glory that made the contemporary spiritual atmosphere of these
American and European Western cities still just possible for a human soul to breathe.

> See III. iii. 369-71. This 'processing’ role that was played by France in the Late
Modem Age of Western history from the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen¬
turies onwards is depicted with an admirable sureness of touch in the following passage
from the pen of a twentieth-century French historian:—

'Puisque nous ne pouvons nous retenir, cn suivant le cheminement dcs idees, de nous
imcrveiller quclcjuefois de leurs routes impr^vucs, Atonnons-nous encore de la prompti¬
tude, de la facility avec laquellc la France acceptc le r 61 e que les circonstances lui
imposent. Cette puissance qui parait au nord, et qui menace son hrfgrfmonie, non seule-
ment ellc 1’accepte, mais clle la sort. A sa propre activiti crfatrice, elle ajoute une activity
nouvclle: clle va introduire les valeurs nordiques sur les marches latins. Empressde,
elle jouera le rfile d’introductrice de la pensie bntannique aupris de sa clicntile italienne,
espagnole, portugaiae. Quelquefoismfme, ellcs’intcrposeracntre lenord etlenord.de telle
sorte qu'unc rtuvre venue de Londres passera par Paris avant d’allcr franchir le Rhin.
Mais, bcaucoup plus souvent, elle transmettra non sculcment ses productions, mais les
productions nnglaises, et ensuite les productions germaniques. A Rome, a Madrid. 4
Lisbonne. Elle les transmettra, non pas commc un simple courrier, indifferent A ce qu’il
transporte; au contraire, elle fera leur toilette; elle les accommodera “aux usages
communs de 1‘Europc": c’est-A-dire au goOt qui rigne en Europe par son fait, au goGt
fran^ais. Ccs Anglais ne sont pas clairs, il faut les decanter; ils n'obiissent pas aux lois
de la logique formelle, il faut introduire de 1’ordre dans leurs idies; ils sont diffus, il
faut les abrrfger; ils sont grossiers, i) faut les affiner. Elle se met A l'ceuvre, change,
coupe, rctaille les habits, met sur les visages de la poudre et du rouge. Les personnages
qu’clle pr<sente au monde, npris son travail, sont encore exotiques, mais A peine: juste
asscz pour plaire sans effaroucher. Elle connait ses mirites; ellc connait le gotit de son
public et dAs lors ellc prend en mains, avec ses propres intirfits, ceux de I'Angleterrc,
et ceux de 1‘Europc. Les traducteurs qu’elle emploie se haussent en dignite; leur tflche
n’est plus cellc d’un simple mamruvre qui vise A la fVddlitd servile; ils deviennent des
cr^ateurs, en second; A tout le moins des plteipotcntiaircs’ (Hazard, P.: La Crist de la
Conscience Europlenne (1680-1713) (Paris 1935, Boivin), pp. 73-74)-

5 x8 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
Modern Western Science had been adroitly pumped up by a series of
talented popularizers, from Fontenelle 1 to Wells, but on a linguistic
terrain which was the most superficial of all its layers. The English
language, for example, had latterly won its competition with the French
by gaining currency in India, China, and Japan as a lingua franca serving
as a medium of intercourse for the pedestrian practical purposes of trade
and politics 2 before the non-Western societies that had taken to using
this Western linguistic medium for these purposes had come to be more
than slightly affected by the rest of the Western culture—above all, its
Christian religious nucleus—of which the English language and the
other Western vernaculars were potential vehicles.

These illustrations of our ‘law’ from the history of the diffusion of the
Modern Western culture have their counterparts in Hellenic and Far
Eastern history. Wc have seen 3 that a Syriac World which had not
proved receptive to the Hellenic culture in its integral form was capti¬
vated eventually, in the 'Abbasid Age, by an intellectual flake of Hellen¬
ism in which its science and philosophy were presented apart from its
art and religion. In an earlier phase of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism’s
radioactivity the art of the Attic drama had acquired a carrying-power
when a cosmopolitan association of artistes had treated it, as French
publicists were to treat the British constitution, by plucking it out of its
native ground in the orchestra of the theatre of Dionysus under the
shadow of the acropolis of Athens in order to take it on tour and ‘produce’
it with a virtuosity that Parthians and Ccltiberians could appreciate. 4
Artistic flakes of a Far Eastern culture which had similarly been detached
from their spiritual core likewise captivated a nascent Iranic Muslim
Society in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of the Christian Era,
and a Modern Western Society from the eighteenth century onwards,
without any simultaneous radiation of a Confucian philosophy and a
Mahayanian religion that were the original settings from which these
fashionably superficial chinoiseries had been detached in order to be
made exportable at the price of being made meaningless.

We may go on to observe that, on every plane, a recipient society finds
it easier to take and use a radiating society’s ready-made products,
material or spiritual, than to master the techniques, habits, feelings, and
thoughts that have to be acquired and appropriated if the recipient is to
become, in his turn, a producer of these alien cultural commodities as
well as a mere consumer of them. The cultural commodities that have
the greatest carrying power of all are lethal tools; but a Pathan trans¬
frontier barbarian in the no-man’s-land beyond the North-West
Frontier of the British Indian Empire during the century ending in a.d.
1947 s would acquire a taste for a Modern Western rifle, and a skill in

« An illuminating sketch of the eighteenth-century French popularizes of the seven¬
teenth-century Western Scientific Revolution will be found in Butterfield, H.: The
Origins of Modern Science, 1300-2S00 (London 1949, Bell), pp. 143-58.

* See V. v. 506-12. 3 On pp. 408-9, above.

* See IV. iv. 243; V. v. 201, n. t, and 481; and p. 405, above.

» The special case of culture-diffusion across a limes between a universal state and
the barbarians beyond its pale, of which the history of the North-West Frontier of
the British Indian Empire is a classical example, has been examined in Part VIII,
passim, above.

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 5 *9

using it, long before he learnt how to manufacture such a rifle for him¬
self, and long indeed before he began to make creative improvements of
his own upon the alien pattern in which the rifle had first come into his
hands ready-made—in contrast to the circumstances of the original
genesis of the rifle in its place of origin in the Western World, where the
production and the use and the improvement of the weapon had all
been inseparably bound up with one another in the process of the rifle’s
evolution.

Following this contrast up, we shall find that, while the Pathan might
take with lightning rapidity and astonishing success to a rifle or a sewing-
machine or a gramophone, and might even teach himself, under the
stimulus of intense desire, to manufacture a remarkably exact copy of a
complicated contemporary Western weapon of precision with the simple
tools that were the sum of his scanty native metallurgical resources, the
same masterly Pathan marksman and gunsmith would show vastly less
aptitude for appropriating any of those Western political institutions
that were part of the secret of the British Raj’s military ascendancy over
the transfrontier barbarian. It was easier for the barbarian to submit
temporarily under duress to British political dictation than to take even
the first toddling step towards mastering the British political art of
parliamentary government; and the culture which was the creative in¬
spiration of all the Western Society’s political and military and techno¬
logical achievements was quite beyond the Pathan’s ken even in the
secularized form, divorced from its religious heart, in which this Western
culture had been at the disposal of non-Western importers since the
close of the seventeenth century.

For instance, our nineteenth-century Pathan knew nothing of the long
and arduous history of a sustained and organized intellectual endeavour
that had created Modern Western Science, and nothing either of the
tragic irony with which an acquisitive-minded Western Society’s lust to
wring material profits out of the disinterested labours of Western intel¬
lectual pioneers had brought in its train its grimly appropriate nemesis
in the shape of the fascinating Victorian invention of a breech-loading
rifle which was the earnest of far more deadly future masterpieces of
a Modern Western Homo Faber's ‘Applied Science’. While the Pathan
succeeded in becoming a modest profit-sharer in the dividends of this
prostitution of a new science to an old barbarism to which the Pathan and
the Frank were, both alike, still morally enslaved in the twentieth century
of the Christian Era, the Pathan was utterly ignorant of the history of
that Western moral progress which—feeble and rudimentary though it
might be found to be when measured by the standards of the Saints—
had nevertheless succeeded, at the cost of a struggle still more arduous
and protracted than the assault of Western Science on Physical Nature,
in enabling some of the Western peoples gradually and partially to
transmute the Old Adam of government by force into a new covenant of
government by consent, 1 and thereby to keep Man’s hope of mundane

« This faint Late Modem Western emanation of the spirit of the Kingdom of God
in the political slum of the Kingdom’s refractory secular province was sometimes
identified by latter-day Western idealists, naively but in all good faith, with the spirit

520 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION
salvation alive by opening up a possibility that lethal weapons which
were so much more dangerous in Frankish than in Pactyan hands might,
in the event, be banned by a Modern Western Democracy’s crypto-
Christian conscience, instead of being recklessly misused in the Ishmacli-
tish warfare which the still unredeemedly barbarous Pathan was prone
to wage with the deadliest weapons that he knew how to employ.

It was still more disconcerting to see the self-same selection of
Western culture-elements that had been made in all innocence by the
untutored Pathan being made likewise by a sophisticated Chinese whose
high state of indigenous culture, at the time in his history when he
encountered the Late Modern West, debarred him from pleading the
mitigating circumstances that could be pleaded on behalf of his East
Iranian barbarian contemporary.

‘There is ... in the process of Westernisation in China a play of fashion
which often appears irresponsible to Westerners, because random and
unconvinced. Western standards, far from being considered admirable
in themselves, arc all suspect and feared as “soulless”, because inimical
to the spirit of China. Accordingly there appears to be, very often, in the
course of adaptation to Western standards, a difficulty in distinguishing
between the mechanics of any given process and the spirit that informs the
process. In this way attempts are often made to take over a method with¬
out adopting the spirit of the society in which the method was originally
developed, and of which it was the natural fruit. Perhaps the most
striking illustration of this type of contradiction is to be found in the
adoption on a large scale of Western armaments with the minimum
adoption of the Western style in warfare. In the same way, when there is
a question of handing over to Chinese control any enterprise originally
developed by foreigners, the least of the difficulties is that of training a
technical staff. The true crisis comes when, with the full assertion of
Chinese control, a standard of enterprise and responsible direction based
on adaptation is substituted for one based on assertion.’ 1

These illustrations of the working of our ‘law’ that the carrying-power
of a detached culture-element in process of radiation is apt to be in
inverse ratio to its spiritual value point to a conclusion at which we have
arrived by a different road in an earlier context. 2 The transmission of the
superficial elements of a culture, in isolation from the essence of this
radioactive culture’s core, is as precarious as it is facile, whereas the

of Christianity itself. This tragi-comically erroneous identification, which was one of the
characteristic illusions of Western men of good will in the writer's age, led a distin¬
guished contemporary and friend of the writer's, who, like the writer, paid his first visit
to Shanghai in A.D. 1929, to indulge in the unwarranted and unfulfilled expectation that
the British complexion of the municipal administration of the International Settlement
in the soulless city would serve to educate the Chinese World of the day in both the
practice and the principles of Modem Western ethics by initiating Chinese politicians
into the neo-pagan mysteries of Modem Western constitutional government. This
Modern Western political idealist showed himself to be a true prophet in divining and
proclaiming the truth that the Western institution of parliamentary government was
built on a rock of ethical principle. The reason why his hopes for China were disappointed
was because he had failed to bear in mind the more fundamental truth that the Western
World's political morality was a moon which shone only with a borrowed and reflected
light, and that the sun of Christianity, which was the ultimate source of this pale political
illumination, was a luminary whose radiance was, not political, but religious.

1 Lattimore, Owen: Manchuria, Cradle o] Conflict (New York r932. Macmillan), pp.
> 53 - 4 - 2 In V. v. 2or.

THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 521
religious quintessence of a radioactive culture, which penetrates an
alien body social only with extreme difficulty, and even then at an
extremely slow pace, is capable, if and when it docs work its way into
this alien body’s heart, of producing a spiritually deeper effect on the
recipient society’s life than the sum of all the radioactive society’s merely
artistic or intellectual or linguistic or political or economic radiation
when these superficial elements are transmitted apart from the religious
life-blood of the migrant culture’s heart.

B28M.nn

S 2

E. THE CONSEQUENCES OF ENCOUNTERS
BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

(I) AFTERMATHS OF UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

(fl) EFFECTS ON THE FORTUNES OF THE ASSAULTED PARTY

T HE effect of an encounter between contemporaries on the life of
both parties is apt to be a disturbing one—and this even for a party
which, at the time of the encounter, is not yet in process of disintegration
but is still in growth. Even in the least untoward possible circum¬
stances the psychological shock produced by a collision between conflict¬
ing civilizations may have consequences of a gravity that is illustrated by
the fates of two societies which, while still in growth, had each repelled
a formidable assault triumphantly.

The Hellenic Society, as we have seen, reacted magnificently to its
ordeal in the years 480-479 B.c. It succeeded in repulsing an onslaught
delivered by a Syriac Society whose forces were united at the time under
the oecumenical sovereignty of the Achaemenian Empire; and the first
perceptible social effect of this military and political triumph was to
give I Icllenism a stimulus to which it responded by bursting into flower
in ever)' field of activity.

‘The vastness of the forces employed in the expedition of Xerxes King
of Persia against Hellas cast the shadow of a terrible danger over the
Hellenic Society. The stakes for which the Hellenes were called upon to
fight were slavery or freedom, while the fact that the Hellenic communities
in Asia had already been enslaved created a presumption in every mind
that the communities in Hellas itself would experience the same fate.
When, however, the war resulted, contrary to expectation, in its amazing
issue, the inhabitants of Hellas found themselves not only relieved from
the dangers which had threatened them but possessed, in addition, of
honour and glory, while every Hellenic community was filled with such
affluence that the whole World was astonished at the completeness with
which the situation had been reversed. During the half-century that
followed this epoch, Hellas made vast strides in prosperity. ... In the
forefront of all, Athens achieved such triumphs of glory and prowess that
her name won almost world-wide renown.’*

Yet, within less than fifty years of the momentous encounter whose
cultural outcome was this Attic flowering of Hellenism, the political out¬
come of the same encounter came to a climax in a disaster which Hellas
first failed to avert and then failed to retrieve; and the root of her post-
Salaminian political disaster was the same sudden brilliant emergence
of Athens which had likewise been the root of the post-Salaminian out¬
burst of Hellenic cultural achievement.

In other contexts 2 we have noticed that, in the age of Hellenic history
preceding the Achaemcnids’ epoch-making attempt to incorporate the

1 Diodorus of Agyrium: A Library oj Universal History, Book XII, chaps. 1-2*,
quoted in full in II. li. 109.

1 See, for instance, I. i. 24-25 and III. iii. 122.

EFFECTS ON THE ASSAULTED PARTY 523
whole of the Hellenic World into their oecumenical empire, Hellas had
accomplished an economic revolution through which she had enabled
herself to maintain a growing population within a no-longer expanding
domain by substituting a new economic regime of specialization and
interdependence for an old one in which each single Hellenic city-state,
and indeed each single village within each civic territory, had been living
as an economically autonomous unit providing for its own subsistence
by producing at home all the staple products that it required. In this
economic revolution in Hellas in the sixth century B.c., Athens had
played a decisively creative part ; 1 but the resulting new economic
regime of interdependence could not be maintained unless it could be
housed within the framework of a new political regime of the same
order, while on the other hand it could not with impunity be allowed to
collapse for lack of being reinforced by its requisite political comple¬
ment, since this new economic regime of interdependence had no sooner
been achieved than it had become indispensable to Hellas in virtue of
its being her sole practicable response to the challenge of finding her
aggressive geographical expansion brought to a halt by a successful
resistance on the part of her neighbours and competitors in the Mediter¬
ranean Basin . 2 Before the close of the sixth century b.c. some form of
political unification to match the accomplished fact of economic inter¬
dependence had thus become the Hellenic World’s most urgent social
need; and during the half century ending in the ordeal of 480-479 B.c.
it had looked as if the solution of this common Hellenic problem would
be found for Hellas—if it was to be found by any Hellenic community—
not by the Athens of Solon and Peisistratus but by the Sparta of Chilon
and Clcomcnes I.

During those fifty years Sparta had been giving a promising lead
towards political unification by helping the economically progressive
Continental European Greek city-states in the neighbourhood of the
Isthmus of Corinth to throw off the despotic governments that had been
the Hellenic economic revolution’s local political concomitants, and
then bringing the communities that had thus been liberated from a
domestic tyranny into an easy-going political association with the
liberator Power. The Achaemenian Empire’s lowering threat to engulf
European Greece could perhaps be converted into a blessing in disguise
for Hellas if the imperative requirements of self-defence in an impend¬
ing military struggle against a gigantic alien aggressor were to impel her
children to achieve the political unification which her economic trans¬
formation was now imperatively demanding; and, incidentally, Hellas’
immediate crying need might prove a heaven-sent opportunity for Sparta,
if she could rise to the occasion by uniting under her military and politi¬
cal leadership the whole of the still unsubjugated European half of the
Hellenic World, as she had already united European Greece’s Pelopon¬
nesian extremity. Unhappily, in this crisis with which Hellas was con¬
fronted by Darius’s fateful resolve to bring European as well as Asiatic
Greece under Achaemenian rule, 3 Sparta left it to Athens to play the

' See II. ii. 38-42- 1 See pp. 423-9. »*>ove.

» See pp. 430-5. »bove.

524 AFTERMATHS OF UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
beau r 6 le\ l and, in consequence, the Hellenic World’s exhilarating
experience in 480-479 B.c. of a deadly danger triumphantly surmounted
not only failed, after all, to bring with it for her the boon of political
unification under the universally accepted hegemony of a single Hellenic
Power, 2 but actually placed athwart her path towards unification an
obstacle which her children failed thereafter to surmount.

1 The sublimity of Leonidas' and his three hundred fellow Lacedaemonians’ personal
self-sacrifice in their forlorn hope at Thermopylae in 480 b.c. was more than offset,
in Sparta’s moral account with Hellas, by the political selfishness and strategic fatuous¬
ness of the Lacedaemonian Government s contemporary public policy. A Power which,
in the crisis of 490 B.c.,had ignominiously failed to put in an appearance on the battle¬
field of Marathon until after the Achaemcnian expeditionary force had been repulsed

a the Athenians and Plataeans single-handed, ran true to form in the greater crisis
480 B.C., when Sparta refused to stake the whole of her magnificent infantry- on trying
to hold the pass of Tcmpe, or even the pass of Thermopylae, in concert with Athens
magnificent navy. The example shown to Hellas at Thermopylae by Leonidas and his
token force was the soldiers’ deed and not their Government's. While Leonidas and his
companions were sacrificing their lives, the Lacedaemonian Government's one idea was
to look after the parochial interests of Laconia and her Peloponnesian neighbours by
fortifying the Isthmus of Corinth; and, in compromising their country’s honour by
staking her existence on this poor-spirited plan, they do not appear to have reflected
that, in thus abandoning Attica as well as the central and northern sections of Continental
European Greece, they were virtually inviting the Athenians to capitulate to the invader
and were thereby doing their worst to deprive themselves of the assistance of the
Athenian Navy, without which the Peloponnese would have been indefensible. If, after
the Persians’ break-through at Thermopylae, the Athenians had shown the same un¬
inspired common sense as was shown by the Thebans, the Athenian Navy would either
have gone out of action or would have changed sides, and in either of these events the
Peloponnesians’ Isthmian wall would have been outflanked by the naval operations of
an irresistibly superior enemy sea-power without any need for the land-troops of the
Achaemcnian expeditionary force to attempt to storm the Isthmus by a frontal attack.
The situation was saved for the Peloponnese, as well as for Hellas as a whole, by the
Athenians' decision, in this supreme emergency, to emulate the heroism of a Spartan
Leonidas whose own Government had failed to catch the hero’s inspiration. By sum¬
moning up the fortitude to keep the sea after the enemy's occupation of their country
and devastation of their city, the Athenians won for Hellas her decisive naval victory at
Salamis.

Even after Athens had thus saved the Peloponnese at Salamis in 480 b.c., the Lace¬
daemonian Government managed nevertheless to come within an ace of losing the war
for Hellas after all in 479 B.C. by threatening to ‘miss the bus' for Plataca as they had
previously 'missed the bus’ for Marathon; and, in the event, the Hellenic victory- at
Plataea, like the Hellenic feat of arms at Thermopylae, was a soldiers' battle and not an
achievement of generalship or statesmanship, as far as the Lacedaemonians were con¬
cerned. Moreover, the Lacedaemonian soldier’s magnificent faithfulness to his tradi¬
tional standards of military honour and prowess was offset after the Battle of Plataca,
once again, by disgraceful conduct in high places. The Lacedaemonian Government’s
cowardice after Thermopylae was eclipsed after Plataea by the treachery of the Lace¬
daemonian commander under whose official auspices the victory had been won. When
it came, in the next phase of the war, to carrying the hostilities into Achaemcnian terri¬
tory for the purpose of liberating those Hellenic communities that had been under
Achaemcnian rule before 480 B.C., the Spartan Regent Pausanias demonstrated his own
imperviousness to the inspiration of his uncle King Leonidas by surrendering un¬
conditionally to the temptation of allowing himself to be dazzled by a signally defeated
Achaemcnian Imperial Majesty’s tinsel sheen of pomp and circumstance. In the act of
disgracing himself by losing his head and becoming a renegade, Pausanias lost for hi*
country the leadership in the war for the liberation of the Asiatic Hellenes from an
Achaemcnian yoke.

2 The indispensability of a centralization of leadership in the hands of a single
Power, as a condition for the achievement of political unity, must have been impressed
on Hellenic minds in the generation of the Great Helleno-Persian War by a then still
painfully recent Hellenic experience. Less than fifty years before 480 b.c. a long-
sustained Hellenic campaign of aggression against the Hellenes’ Phoenician competitors in
the West ern Mediterranean had been effectively arrested by a union of the Libyphoenician
city-states under the hegemony of Carthage (see pp. 426-9. above). The opportunity
that the Carthaginians had thus seized when the challenge of Hellenic aggression had
presented it was now being offered by the challenge of Acliaemenian aggression to

EFFECTS OK THE ASSAULTED PARTY 525

Instead of leaving Sparta the unchallenged leader of a Pan-Hellenic
confederacy, the ordeal of 480-479 b . c . liberated Asiatic Greece from
Achaemenian rule only to leave the Hellenic World as a whole formid¬
ably divided in its political allegiance between a Sparta who had not
discredited herself so seriously as to forfeit the goodwill of her pre-war
Peloponnesian allies and an Athens who had not distinguished herself
so irresistibly as to overcome the repugnance of her post-war insular and
Asiatic satellites to their exchange of a Persian domination for an Athenian
hegemony. This division of Hellas into two mutually hostile camps was
a consequence of the impact of her encounter with the Achaemenian
Empire on her problem of transcending her own political parochialism;
and this domestic outcome of her victorious repulse of Darius’s and
Xerxes’ assault proved in retrospect to have been a fatal turning-point
in her history when she met with the fall that overtakes every house
that remains stubbornly divided against itself. 1 The opposing camps
eventually drifted into the Atheno-Peloponnesian War, and the out¬
break of that war signified the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization.

The plight of political polarization that was the portentous price of the
Hellenic Society’s victory in its military encounter with a Syriac univer¬
sal state in the shape of the Achaemenian Empire was likewise the fate
by which the Hellenic World’s successor, Orthodox Christendom, was
overtaken in the sequel to this civilization’s still more amazing victory,
in the hour of its own birth, over a Syriac universal state that had been
re-established in the seventh century of the Christian Era in the shape of
the Arab Caliphate. 2 On the morrow- of the defeat of the Arabs’ attempt
to take Constantinople in a.d. 673-7, an Orthodox Christendom which
had purchased by this victory the possibility of coming to life came
within an ace of committing suicide when an Anatolic and an Armeniac
army corps threatened to engage in a fratricidal struggle for supremacy
which would have been as fatal for Orthodox Christendom as the struggle
between Sparta and Athens had been for Hellas.

Orthodox Christendom was saved from this fate by the genius of her
Emperors Leo III and his son Constantine V; J by the union sacree which
was forced upon her Anatolic and Armeniac rival champions when the
Arab offensive was resumed in a.d. 716-18; and by the abiding and
compelling memory of a Roman Empire which had been the master
institution of an antecedent Hellenic Society in the last phase of its
history. The hold of this memory upon Orthodox Christian hearts and
minds made it possible for Leo and Constantine to persuade the two
rival army corps to liquidate their feud by agreeing with one accord to
merge themselves in a unitary East Roman Empire that made an
irresistible appeal to their imagination and their loyalty by presenting
itself as a Rome risen from the dead. 4 The raising of a ghost, however, is
not a means of salvation that can ever be embraced with impunity; and,

Sparta in the Hellenic World in the next chapter of the story of the encounter between
a Syriac and a pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization.

> Matt. xii. 25; Luke xi. 17.

s The historical relation between the Arab Caliphate and the Achaemenian Empire
has been tentatively elucidated in I. i. 76-77.

J See IV. iv. 341-2. 4 See II. ii. 368 and III. iii. 276.

S 26 AFTERMATHS OF UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
in saddling an infant Orthodox Christendom with the incubus of an
absolute authoritarian state, Leo Syrus merely postponed her fall with¬
out averting it. He saved her from ruining herself in a fratricidal struggle
between an Anatolic and an Armeniac army corps in the eighth century
of the Christian Era by giving an unfortunate turn to her political
development; and this perversion brought its nemesis when, some 250
years later, the breakdown of the Orthodox Christian Civilization duly
declared itself in the outbreak of a more terrible fratricidal struggle
between an East Roman Empire and Patriarchate on the one side and a
Bulgarian Empire and Patriarchate on the other. 1

If an Orthodox Christian and an Hellenic Society thus each alike
eventually succumbed to untoward after-effects of an encounter with
an aggressive contemporary after the aggressor had been triumphantly
repelled by Hellas in her youth and by Orthodox Christendom in her
infancy, we shall not be surprised to find at least as unhappy an effect
following from the discomfiture of aggressors by civilizations that have
been already in process of disintegration by the time when they have
been overtaken by these critical encounters.

We have already taken note of the price for success in arresting
Hellenic aggression that was exacted by History from the Libyphocnician
colonies of a Syriac Society which had broken down, some four hundred
years before, on the morrow of the generation of King Solomon. 2 The
price was a spiritually impoverishing regime of self-insulation behind
‘a wooden curtain’. 3 We have also observed 4 that the ‘hermit empire’
which was established in the sixth century B.c. round the Western Basin
of the Mediterranean by Carthage had an avatar in the sixteenth century
of the Christian Era on the farther side of the Atlantic Ocean round the

Spanish Main; and we can now go on to observe that this Spanish re-

tion of the Carthaginian feat of arresting the expansion of Hellenism; for,
at this same price, the Spaniards in their turn succeeded in arresting the
intrusion of their Dutch, English, and French West European neigh¬
bours and rivals into the Americas.

In a Japanese offshoot of the Far Eastern Society an Early Modern
Western Christendom’s attempt to penetrate this alien body social
through the peaceful influence of traders and missionaries at the
moment of the final paroxysm of a Japanese Time of Troubles was
successfully quashed by drastic Japanese counter-measures on the
morrow of the establishment of a Japanese universal state; and this
Japanese success in expelling and excluding the Portuguese intruders,
and in eradicating or driving underground the Tridentine Roman
Catholic Christianity which the Jesuits had been planting in a Japanese
mission-field, was purchased, like the abortive contemporary Spanish
attempt to keep the Spaniards’ fellow West European maritime rivals

1 The chain of historical cause and effect leading from the establishment of the East
Roman Empire by I.eo 111 and Constantine V in a.d. 717-75 to the outbreak of the Great
Romano-Bulgarian War in A.D. 977 has been tiaced in II. ii. 368-9 and in IV. iv.
320-408. • * See I. i. 82 and IV. iv. 67-68.

1 Sec pp. 428-9 and 437-8, above. 4 On pp. 485-6, above.

EFFECTS ON THE ASSAULTED PARTY 527
out of the Americas, at the price of putting a stop to all Japanese
activities beyond the coasts of the Japanese Archipelago and converting
a politically united Japan into an hermetically sealed Far Eastern counter¬
part of the less effectually closed Castilian Empire of the Indies . 1

These Japanese, Spanish, and Libyphoenician examples of the
spiritual toll exacted by History from an assaulted society for its success
in repulsing its assailant’s attack arc all dwarfed by the enormity of the
latter end of an Egyptiac Civilization which paid for its success in fend¬
ing off its Hittite assailants in the thirteenth century B.c., and in arrest¬
ing the avalanche of a post-Minoan Volkerwandcrung at the turn of the
thirteenth and twelfth centuries, by incurring the doom of Tithonus . 2

If we now take a synoptic view of the passages of history which we
have cited as illustrations in our present inquiry’, our survey may suggest
certain tentative findings. Without impugning our conclusion, reached
in an earlier Part of this Study , 1 that the coroner’s verdict on the ‘deaths’
of civilizations proves invariably to be ‘suicide’ and not ‘murder’ in
cases in which there is sufficient evidence to warrant a judgement, our
present investigation seems to indicate that an assault, even when
successfully repulsed, has a seriously disturbing effect on the assaulted
party’s domestic life, and that this disturbance presents a challenge
which—whether prohibitively severe or not—had in fact proved too
much for the parties that had been exposed to it in all cases within the
knowledge of historians in the sixth decade of the twentieth century of
the Christian Era. In the cases in which the victorious assaulted society
had been still in its growth-stage at the time of the assault, its failure
to respond successfully to the consequent challenge had resulted in its
breaking down, while, in the cases in which, at the time, it had already
been in disintegration, the penalty of failure to meet the same consequent
challenge had been a spiritual catalepsy and a symptomatic social petri¬
faction to which the Libyphoenicians, the Creoles, and the Japanese had
each succumbed for a spell, and the Egyptiac Society for all the rest of
an unnaturally prolonged life-span.

(6) EFFECTS ON THE FORTUNES OF THE ASSAILANT

If we now go on to examine the aftermaths of unsuccessful assaults
in the subsequent histories of the foiled assailants, we shall find that the
consequent challenges have proved severe a fortiori.

The Hittites, for example, were, as we have seen, left so desperately
weak by their over-exertion in their eventually unsuccessful attempt to
conquer the Egyptian Crown’s Asiatic possessions in the fourteenth and
thirteenth centuries b.c. that they were subsequently submerged by the
wave of a post-Minoan Volkerwandcrung which the Egyptiac World just
managed to roll back from the coast of the Delta—with the consequence
that a Hittite Society, which had been still in growth at the time when it

« See pp. 3x6-24, above. The Dutch trading settlement marooned on the islet of
Deshima, which was the solitary unsevered link between Japan and the rest of the World
during the Tokugawa Age of Japanese history, has been noticed in II. ii. 232-4.

* In IV. iv. n5-19.

528 AFTERMATHS OF UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
succumbed, survived only in the fragmentary form of a cluster of fossil
communities astride the Taurus, whereas the Egyptiac Society survived
geographically intact in its posthumous state of life-in-death. The after-
math of the Siceliot Greeks’ abortive aggression against their Phoenician
and Etruscan competitors took the milder form of a political paralysis
which did not cripple their artistic and intellectual activities.

As we have noticed in another context, 1 the exigencies of a long-
drawn-out losing battle against the counter-offensive of a Libyphoenician
World, that had effectively united its own forces under a Carthaginian
single command, constrained the hard-pressed Siceliotsto sacrifice their
cherished local city-state sovereignties and liberties by allowing them¬
selves to be brigaded under the yokes of military despotisms; but the
Siceliots in the fifth, fourth, and third centuries B.C., like the Italians in
the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era, 2
condemned themselves to have the worst of both worlds by failing to
go beyond half-measures. Instead of emulating their Libyphoenician
antagonists’ rewarding sixth-century achievement of an enduring poli¬
tical unity under the hegemony of a single one of their number, the
Siceliots never achieved more than local and temporary consolidations
of political and military power which deprived them of the boons of
national independence and domestic freedom without sufficing to re¬
capture for them the upper hand in their conflict with the Carthaginian
Empire; and in the last chapter of the story, when they were within an
ace of being totally subjugated by the remorseless advance of this semi-
Hcllcnized Syriac counter-aggressor, they were saved only at the cost
of having to exchange the ineffective rule of their home-grown parochial
despots for the potent dominion of a Hellenized barbarian Great Power.
Rome not only stemmed the Carthaginian attack on the Hellenic World;
she banished this Carthaginian peril once for all by breaking through
a ‘wooden curtain’ that had proved impenetrable for over 250 years,
and sweeping the Carthaginian Empire off the map. In the Romano-
Punic Wars the Romans attained an Hellenic objective which had always
eluded the Siceliot Greek despots’ aim, in virtue of a Roman genius
for empire-building that utterly outranged the shorter-sighted political
vision of the Dcinomenidae and Dionysii.

If the aftermath of an unsuccessful assault on a contemporary society
proved to be as serious as this for a Hittite and an Hellenic World which
were both still in process of growth at the time of their fateful en¬
counters with an Egyptian neighbour in the one case and with a Liby¬
phoenician neighbour in the other, it is not surprising to find disaster
overtaking the main body of a Syriac World which had tried and failed
to make itself mistress of Hellas at a stage of Syriac history at which the
disintegration of a broken-down society had arrived at its ultima ratio ,
a universal state. In an earlier chapter of this Part of our Study 3 we have
watched the Achaemenian hybris that had inveigled Darius the First
into his decision to annex European Greece duly bringing its nemesis
in the overthrow of Darius the Last by Alexander of Macedon.

■ In III. iii. 357, n. 1. i See III. iii. 354-7.

1 On pp. 430-7, above.

529

(II) AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

(a) EFFECTS ON THE BODY SOCIAL

I. Symptoms in the Social Life of the Assailant

We have observed 1 that, in encounters between contemporaries in
which ‘the agent’s’ impact on ‘the reagent’ has resulted in a successful
penetration of the assaulted body social by the assailant’s cultural radia¬
tion, the two parties to the encounter usually prove to have been already
in process of disintegration by the time when the interaction between
them had begun; and we have also observed 2 that one of the criteria of
disintegration is the schism of the body social of a disintegrating society
into a minority that has come to be merely dominant instead of being
creative and a proletariat that has come to be morally alienated from
ci-devant leaders who have turned into changeling masters. This social
schism is likely to have occurred already in the body social of a society
whose cultural radiation is successfully penetrating the body social of one
of its neighbours; and the social symptom that is the most signal conse¬
quence of this always untoward and often undesired social success is an
aggravation of the problem which the secession of an internal proletariat
presents to a dominant minority in any case. A proletariat is intrinsically
an awkward element in a society, even when it is a purely home-grown
product; but its awkwardness is sharply accentuated if its numerical
strength is reinforced, and its cultural complexion is variegated, by an
intake of alien man-power; and this is the penalty which a successfully
aggressive society is bound to pay—and the revenge which its success¬
fully assaulted victim is able to take.

In a previous chapter of this Part 1 we have noticed the efforts of
Roman, Hapsburg, and American statesmanship to stem this insidious
counterflow of cultural influence; but our earlier survey of the growth
and composition of an Hellenic and a Western internal proletariat 4 is a
commentary on the futility of attempting to arrest the subtle progress of
a culture-ray by placing athwart its path the coarse-grained fabric of a
political bulkhead. Iam pridem Syrus in Tiberim dejluxit Orontes 5 would
have been as true a verdict on the efficacy of the Hapsburg Imperial-
Royal Government’s phobia in a. d. 1915-18 against further annexations
of Orthodox-Christian-inhabited territories, or on the efficacy of the
United States immigration restriction acts of a.d. 1921 and a.d. 1924
and a.d. 1952, as it was on the efficacy of Augustus’s reluctance to in¬
crease the relative strength of the Oriental element in the population
and the culture of the Roman Empire by salvaging for a post-Alexandrine
Hellenism her lost Oriental dominions east of Euphrates.

In a Modern Western World that had made itself literally world-wide
by radiating its influence over the whole habitable surface of the Earth,
not only the Orontes but the Ganges and the Yangtse had discharged
into the Thames and the Hudson, while the Danube had performed the

1 On p. 507. above. 1 In V. v. 58-194-

J On pp. 510-14. above. * See V. v. 58-82 and 152-94.

» Juvenal: Satires, No. Ill, 1. 62, quoted in V. v. 67.

53 © AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
more sensational miracle of reversing the direction of its flow in order
to deposit a cultural alluvium of Rum an and Serb and Bulgar and
Greek proselytes up-stream in a Viennese melting-pot. Si testimonium
requiris, was not the evidence printed in extenso and made public in the
telephone directories of Vienna 1 and Paris and London and New York
and Chicago and a host of lesser cities in the European and American
provinces of a Western Society’s homeland ? And did not these endless
columns of close print, bristling with outlandish non-Western surnames,
attest the advent, in a twentieth-century Westernizing World, of the
blight of promiscuity 2 that had been demoralizing a Hcllenizing World
in Juvenal’s day?

The social price that a successfully aggressive civilization has to pay
is a seepage of its alien victims’ exotic culture into the lifestream of the
aggressor society’s internal proletariat and a proportionate widening of
the moral gulf that already yawns between this alienated proletariat
and a would-be dominant minority.

2. Symptoms in the Social Life of the Assaulted Party
(a) 'One Man's Meat is Another Man's Poison'

The effects of a successful assault on the body social of the assaulted
party are more complex, without being less pernicious, than the corres¬
ponding effects on the body social of the victim’s victorious assailant.
On the one hand we shall find that a culture-element which has been
harmless or actually beneficial in the body social in which it is at home
is apt to produce novel and devastating effects in an alien body in which
it has lodged itself as an exotic and isolated intruder. On the other hand
we shall find that, when once an isolated exotic culture-element has
thus succeeded in forcing an entry into the life of an assaulted society,
and in holding its ground in this occupied alien territory, it tends to
draw in after it other elements of the same provenance with which the
lone pioneer element has been associated in its and their original com¬
mon home. It will be convenient to examine the working of these tw'o
apparent ‘laws’ of cultural radiation-and-reccption in the order in which
we have just introduced them; and, in considering first the ‘law’ that
a culture-element W’hich has been harmless at home is apt to work
havoc if it is isolated and exported, we may begin by observing that the
operation of this law is familiar to us in the realms of Physical Life and
Inanimate Nature.

It is, for example, one of the common experiences of every-day
physical life that this or that individual human being may have a diges¬
tive system that is peculiar in being ‘allergic’ to foods that are standing
dishes in his society’s staple diet; and, in the intercourse between one
society' and another, it is notorious that alcoholic drinks which may have
a comparatively innocuous effect upon members of a society in which
the use of alcohol is customary may prove deadly when introduced into
a society in which strong drink has previously been unknown. In a
Westernizing World this had been the effect of the spirituous liquors

« See VI. vii. 235 , n. i. * See V. v. 439-568.

‘ONE MAN’S MEAT ANOTHER MAN’S POISON’ 53 x
imported by Western Christian traders on the health of the native
peoples of West Africa and North America; and what had been true
of the ‘fire-water’ that was 'the Paleface’s’ familiar spirit had been
likewise true of the infectious diseases that were his commonplace
maladies. A whooping-cough that was a mild complaint when it attacked
a Western child, and no worse than an unpleasant ordeal when it
attacked a Western adult, might decimate or even exterminate the
population of a Polynesian island never previously exposed to attack
by a germ whose chosen vessel had been Western Man; and in the
writer’s generation the operation of the same law in the realm of In¬
animate Nature had been shown up in a ghastly light by a horrifying
practical application of post-Modern Western Man’s intellectually
magnificent theoretical feat of discerning the structure of the Atom.
The discovery of ‘the know-how’ for manufacturing atomic bombs and
the consequent employment of these unprecedentedly potent weapons
in a world war had brought home even to the least scientifically in¬
structed mind of the day the terrifying potentialities of a physical
element which was harmlessly or even usefully inert so long as the
electron-components of its atoms were duly gravitating round their
atomic nucleus in the pattern of atomic structure that had been normal
in the physical ‘make-up’ of this planet during the aeon in which it had
been serving as a home for living creatures. The fate of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki had demonstrated that a hitherto innocuous substance might
become explosive to a degree that would be lethal for all life within
range when human ingenuity had learnt the trick of stripping an atom’s
sun-like nucleus of the electrons that were its planet-like satellites. The
disastrous human consequences of this audacious technological feat
had been foreshadowed in the Hellenic myths of the unleashing of
Aeolus’s wind-bag 1 and the opening of Pandora’s box. 1

In this latter-day atomic exposition of our law the explanation of this
law’s working was manifest. The latent physical energy, of a deadly
potency, that was released through the splitting of an atom, had been
kept in store in the intact structure of the integral atom through being
neutralized there by an equilibrium of forces that was an expression, in
terms of force, of the atom’s structural pattern. It will be seen that, in
the integral atom, the destructive potentialities of the constituents had
been held in check by an inanimate equivalent of the sociality which was
the working constitution of Physical as well as Spiritual Life. This rela¬
tion of interdependence and consequent reciprocal obligation between
the cells composing a living body and the organism constituted by these
components was indeed the elixir of Life—as was demonstrated by the
deadliness of the cancer by which a living organism was afflicted when¬
ever any of its cells sought to live just for and by themselves without
regard to the social reciprocity which was the necessary condition of
survival for body and cells alike.

This law governing the cells’ relations with the whole organism and
with one another was also operative in their relations with foreign

1 Odyssey, Book X, II. 19-55.

1 Hesiod: Works and Days, II. 42-105, especially 11 . 83-104.

532 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
organic substances, whether dead or alive. The unlucky individual for
whom his neighbours’ meat was poison was plagued with this personal
infirmity owing to some peculiarity in the chemical composition of his
body’s gastric juices which produced a dyspeptic chemical reaction
when these juices encountered the particular food to which this parti¬
cular individual was ‘allergic’—in contrast to the eupeptic reaction
produced in a normal stomach by an encounter between exactly the
same food and a battery of gastric juices of the standard brew. In the
more fateful battles between a living organism’s defence-force of
soldier-cells and the hostile intrusive germs whose invasion was diag¬
nosed by medical practitioners as one of the recognized diseases, the
reason why an identical disease was sometimes apt to be more serious
for adults than for children, or vice versa, was presumably because, at
different ages, the assaulted organism’s defensive equipment for oppos¬
ing the attack of an identical aggressor would vary according to the
stage of life in which the victim of the attack happened to be caught by
his assailant, with the consequence that the transitions from one age
to another would be accompanied by variations in the relative strength
of the combatants in this warfare between bacteria and phagocytes.

On the same view of an ailing human body as the battlefield of two
opposing armies, we can also see why the effects of an identical disease
on different victims should differ in the degree of their severity when
the difference between the victims was not the difference in age between
children and adults within the bosom of the same society but the differ¬
ence in experience and expectation between members of a society in
which the disease in question had long been endemic and members of
another society which had hitherto been exempt from this particular
malady. In a society in which a disease was rife, the white corpuscles in
the body of every living human being would have been stimulated,
exercised, and trained by their experience of repeated past encounters
with a perennial invader to be perpetually on the alert for a fresh attack,
and to meet this attack, when it came, with a vigour and skill inspired by
an awareness of a familiar enemy’s special points of strength and weak¬
ness. By contrast, the identically constituted white corpuscles in the
bodies of members of a society which this identical disease was visiting
for the first time would be apt to succumb to an unfamiliar aggressor
whose attack would have taken them by surprise and whose armaments
and tactics would have been novel to them.

It will now have become apparent that our ‘law* to the effect that ‘one
man’s meat is another man’s poison’ represents, in the province of
external relations between one individual or society and another, the
local operation of a law of wader currency which we have already observed
in action in the province of an individual’s or society’s internal affairs. 1
In studying what happens in the domestic life of a society when a fresh
dynamic force asserts itself—or a fresh creative movement starts—from
within, we have seen that this new event is bound to be a challenge to the
existing pattern of culture-elements which is the basis of the society’s
present state of health, and that this challenge cannot be ignored

* See IV. iv. 133-7.

•ONE MAN’S MEAT ANOTHER MAN’S POISON’ 5 33
with impunity. In the new situation that the new event has produced,
social health can be preserved only through an adjustment of the old
pattern to accommodate the new feature, and this adjustment is tanta¬
mount to a replacement of the old pattern by a new one, or, in other
words, to a thorough-going reconstruction of this particular social
universe. 1

The penalty for ignoring the necessity of making this adjustment,
or for seeking to evade it, is either a revolution, in which the new-born
dynamic force shatters a traditional culture-pattern that has proved too
rigid to afford it accommodation, or else an enormity engendered by
the introduction of the new force’s demonic driving-power into the
structure of an obstinately rigid culture-pattern whose fabric has proved
tough enough to withstand the new force’s unprecedentedly powerful
pressure. It will be seen that the encounter between a new culture-
clement and an old culture-pattern is always governed by the same
law, whether the new element happens to emerge from within or to
impinge from outside. In both these variations on a dramatic situation
which is the same in both cases in the last analysis, the introduction of
the new element condemns the old pattern, ipso facto, to undergo a
change either in its structure or in its working; and, except in so far as
this inexorable summons of new life is effectively met by an evolutionary
adjustment of the culture-pattern’s structure, the potentially creative
and life-giving visitant will actually deal deadly destruction. Its admoni¬
tion is: ‘See, I have set before thee this day Life and Good, and Death
and Evil; 2 alria eXopevov' Geos avairios.’ 3

In the present place wc are concerned with the situation in which the
challenging visitant for whom accommodation has to be found if he is
not to turn a sleepy heaven into a lively hell is an alien intruder who has
taken the kingdom by force; 4 and, unlike the new-born babe who sub¬
verts the kingdom from within, the dark invader is an adult who, before
Fate cast him for his present cruel role of a miserable deracinc and a
militant ‘displaced person’, has enjoyed a previous existence as the com¬
fortable law-abiding citizen of another kingdom where he has been an
Israel and not an Ishmael.

Sociality is a facile virtue for an autochthonous son of the soil who
possesses a legal domicile as his birthright and who has been brought up
into a social system of reciprocal rights and duties which, when the
budding citizen was at his formative age, was a going concern hallowed
by tradition and tested by experience. This fortunate son of the house
finds himself born into a social milieu where he has a raison d'itre for his
existence and a legitimate outlet for his energies in so far as these are
directed to socially valuable aims, while, in so far as his aims are socially
undesirable, they are prevented from running amok by a salutary system
of constitutional checks and balances. But, when Fate transfigures a

1 In II. i. 277-99 wc have noticed the service performed by the Devil in constraining

God to resume His work of creation, and thus enabling God to break the deadlock that
is the nemesis of the perfection of His workmanship. 1 Deut. xxx. 15.

J 'The choice is the chooser’s responsibility; God is not responsible’ (Plato: Res-
publica, Book X, 617 s), quoted previously in IV. iv. 465.

4 Matt. xi. 12; cp. Luke xvi. 16.

534 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
Minoan Rhadamanthus into a Philistine Goliath, or an inoffensive
Jewish denizen of the Pale, whose heart and head have been dedicated
to the interpretation and observance of the Mosaic Law, into a Zionist
sicarius blessing the Lord his strength, which teachcth his hands to war
and his fingers to fight , 1 this demoralizing metamorphosis brings bane
to the Holy Land; and a simile taken from two episodes in the history of
Palestine may help us to understand how it is possible for a culture-
element that has played the good citizen’s part in the culture-pattern in
which it is at home to behave like an outlaw 2 when it has been uprooted
from its native soil, been divorced from its former associates, and been
driven into exile in a strange and hostile land. The isolated vagrant
culture-element plays havoc in the foreign body where it lodges because
the diffraction that has sundered it from its native setting has, at one
stroke, deprived it of its previous raison d’etre and released it from the
discipline of its previous counterweights and antidotes.

Examples of this devastating play of an expatriated culture-element
invading an alien social milieu have already come to our notice in our
survey of encounters between contemporaries in a previous portion of
this Part . 3

We have noticed, for instance, some of the tragedies that had been
inflicted in the course of fourteen centuries on divers non-Westem
societies by the impact of the Western World’s peculiar political institu¬
tion. The essential feature of the Western political ideology had been its
insistence on taking as its principle of political association the physical
accident of geographical propinquity, instead of finding the basis for
a sense of political solidarity in a spiritual affinity of the kind that is both
reflected in and fostered by a community of religious observances and
beliefs. At the genesis of a Western Christian Society out of a post-
Hellenic social interregnum we have seen 4 the emergence of this
distinctively Western political ideal in Visigothia in the sixth and seventh
centuries of the Christian Era make life impossible for a local Jewish
diaspork when this incompatible Gentile ideal collided with the system
of non-territorial autonomy within an ecclesiastical framework that
the Jewish diaspork had inherited from its Syriac past. In contrast to the
new Western ideology of political, social, and cultural Gleichschaltung
within the arbitrarily drawn frontiers of some barbarian successor-state

1 Psalm cxliv. i.

* 'Individuals who have become severed from their background arc restless, un¬
satisfied, often desperate creatures, pursued by stinging, reckless impulses. . . . The
individual who has been prised away from his collective background usually manifests

3 toms parallel to those found among migrating hordes. The recklessness which so
spreads throughout an unorganized, migrating mass is a terrifying one. A gold-
rush, an invading or retreating army in a foreign land, an exodus of people in the mass—
all have certain characteristics in common, namely a dangerous lowering of respon¬
sibility towards human life and property and a sub-human, unthinking urgency which,
like a river in spate, tends to overrun and destroy everything in its path. Man is not the
only animal prone to moods of recklessness: all migrating animals moving in vast hordes,
as, for instance, the lemmings of the Arctic Circle, salmon, locusts, caterpillars, and, to a
certain degree, migratory birds and mammals when moving er. masse, are inspired by an
almost suicidal recklessness quite foreign to their normal adapted character 1 (Baynes,
H. G.: Mythology of the Soul: A Research into the Unconscious from Schizophrenic Dreams
and Dressings (London 1940, Bailliire, Tindall & Cox; 1949, Methuen), p. 460).

* See pp. 106-453. »bove. * On pp. 277-80, above.

•ONE MAN’S MEAT ANOTHER MAN’S POISON’ 535
of the Roman Empire, the Syriac millet system was, as we have observed,
a practical solution, worked out in response to experience, for the prob¬
lem presented to statesmanship by the geographical intermingling of
different communities with one another. In ignoring the problem and
attempting to iron the local Jewish millet out of existence by subjecting
its members to political, economic, and psychological pressure of an in¬
human degree of severity, the rulers of Visigothia inflicted anguish on
the Jews at the price of disgrace and eventual disaster for the bigot
Power itself.

The havoc worked by a nascent Western political ideology in a
seventh-century Visigothia began to afflict the World outside the
narrow West European homeland of Western Christendom after the
opening of the Modern Age of Western history, when a puissant wave
of Modern Western cultural influence carried with it into one quarter
after another of the habitable surface of the planet a peculiar Western
political ideology which was now keyed-up to an unprecedented pitch of
fanatical intensity by the impact of the new spirit of Democracy upon
the old Western institution of Territorial Sovereignty embodied in
parochial states. 1

For anyone who happened to have been born and brought up in
Western Europe since the eruption of this Modem Western Democracy,
the concept of Territorial Nationality was, no doubt, something self-
evident. Every West European would be familiar with his own nation,
and he would have little difficulty in defining it as being the population
of a continuous and clearly demarcated block of territory whose inhabi¬
tants were united by the common possession of a distinctive social
heritage and by a common membership in a single sovereign independent
body politic in which this social heritage had found its political expres¬
sion. In the social heritage of a West European nation a common national
language was apt to be one of the salient distinctive features; and, though
this linguistic expression of nationality was not to be found in every
West European nation’s cultural •make-up’, it counted for much, when
it was present (as it usually was), in the evocation and the maintenance
of a nation’s political consciousness.

All this was taken for granted by West Europeans, simply because, in
Western Europe, national heritages, including national languages, hap¬
pened for the most part to be distributed geographically in separate
and severally self-contained blocks, on the pattern of a patchwork quilt,
with the consequence that the local political allegiances of the peoples of
Western Europe had crystallized, in the course of West European history,
in this geographical formation. The political life of Western Europe
had set hard on this locally not unnatural and, on the whole, not un¬
satisfactory basis before another combination of historical causes had
happened to give these now national-minded peoples of Western
Europe a temporary ascendancy over the rest of the World; and these
two chains of historical development combined to invest a latter-day
West European political institution with an imposing prestige in alien
social milieux where this institution was not indigenous. These alien
» See IV. iv. 156-67.

536 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

peoples admired, or at any rate envied, the Modern West Europeans’
political success, and they assumed that the distinctive West European
political ideology of Nationalism had been the cause of it. The West
European institution of the Parochial National State was taken by these
politically less successful proselytes for a talisman that would automatic¬
ally confer political efficiency and power on any people who appro¬
priated it; and, with this simple-minded expectation, they hastened to
adopt this West European Nationalism without pausing to consider
whether the effect that it had produced in its native environment was
likely to be reproduced in an alien social setting.

This line of reasoning and action, of course, was not only naive but
was fallacious on more than one account. In the first place the West
European social setting which had given birth to the political ideal of
Territorial Nationalism was a peculiar local milieu which was an excep¬
tion, not the rule, in the World as a whole. In Western Europe, where
this Territorial Nationalism had originated, it was a natural dispensation
in the sense that there it had been a spontaneous growth answering on
the political plane to the underlying local pattern of human geography.
In the second place the West European peoples had never been pedantic
or fanatical in pushing this native and locally natural political ideal of
theirs to extremes. The common sense of the West European peoples,
as well as the abnormality of the West European social milieu, was one
of the keys to an explanation of the contrast between the comparative
innocuousness of the principle of Territorial Nationality in its West
European home and the havoc that it worked when it was recklessly
introduced into alien social milieux by proselytes who were condemned
to be doctrinaires because they were following an exotic political theory
whose practical application had never come within the range of their
own ancestral experience. Since the linguistic aspect of West European
Nationalism was the feature that leapt to an alien eye, the pedantry of
these doctrinaire nationalists in partibus alienis fastened upon this, and,
in doing so, made a most unfortunate departure from traditional West
European native practice by finding the criterion of Nationality in the
shibboleth of Language.

We have indeed observed already in another context 1 that Modern
Western Nationalism was comparatively innocuous in its West Euro¬
pean birthplace, where, for the most part, it took the political map as
it found it, and was content to utilize the existing parochial states,
within their established frontiers, as its crucibles for the decoction of its
intoxicating political brew of psychic energy. Its noxious potentialities
revealed themselves on alien ground where, so far from consecrating
the frontiers which it found on the map, this aggressive exotic political
ideology denounced them in the name of the explosive academic proposi¬
tion that all persons who happened to be speakers of this or that verna¬
cular language had a natural right to be united politically with one
another in a single sovereign independent national state and therefore
had a moral obligation to sacrifice their own and their neighbours’ wel¬
fare, happiness, and life itself in the pursuit of this pedantic political

' In IV. iv. 185-90.

‘ONE MAN’S MEAT ANOTHER MAN’S POISON’ 537
programme. This linguistic interpretation—or caricature—of the West
European ideology of Nationalism was never taken au pied de la lettre
in the West European countries themselves, since here the external bond
provided by community of speech was always recognized as being merely
one among divers outward signs of an inward sense of political solidarity
springing from common political experiences, institutions, and ideals.

The national unity of the French nation, or the British nation, for
instance, w'as not disrupted by the diversity of the French or English
mother tongue of a majority of the citizens from the Celtic mother
tongue of a minority in Brittany or Wales; and the centuries-old politi¬
cal association of the French-speaking inhabitants of the Val d’Aosta
with the Italian-speaking inhabitants of Piedmont under the common
rule of the House of Savoy 1 moved the Aostans on the morrow of the
Second World War to opt in favour of continuing to be citizens of a
defeated Italy, which they felt to be their mother country, in preference
to becoming citizens of a France who had come out on the winning side
and who was now appealing to them to join her on the strength of their
common possession of the same mother tongue. Next door to the Val
d’Aosta, in Switzerland, Western Europe offered the spectacle of a nation
which had as lively a sense of national solidarity and individuality as any
other nation in the Western World, and had preserved its national inde¬
pendence against all comers by showing an unwavering determination
to defend it in arms, if necessary, by a levle en masse, though these
diversely German, French, and Italian-speaking Swiss patriots had not
any distinctive national language of their own to serve as an audible
symbol of their distinctive national feeling. Switzerland was too hard a
nut for Linguistic Nationalism to crack; and the golden opportunities
for this travesty of a West European political idea to do its devil’s work
presented themselves, beyond the confines of Nationalism’s West Euro¬
pean birthplace, in regions where political inexperience gave political
pedantry a free hand.

We have seen* how, in the course of the hundred years ending in
a.d. 1918, Linguistic Nationalism disrupted a Danubian Hapsburg
Monarchy which had been a marchmcn’s supra-national union sacree
symbolized in a common allegiance to a dynasty charged with an oecu¬
menical mission to defend Western Christendom against Ottoman
aggression. The revolutionary revision of the political map of Central
Europe which swept the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy away be¬
stowed, in the act, the doubtful blessing of an ephemeral political
liberation on the submerged peoples of a ci-devant United Kingdom of
Poland-Lithuania which had been partitioned between the Hapsburg,
Hohenzollcrn, and Romanov empires in the course of the last three
decades of the eighteenth century. Poland-Lithuania had been the
Hapsburg Monarchy’s neighbour and counterpart to the north of the
Carpathians, where its mission had been to hold Western Christendom’s
fourteenth-century conquests of Russian Orthodox Christian territory
against the counter-attacks of an unconquercd interior of Russia whose
formerly divided peoples had made it possible to redress the balance of
« See IV. iv. 285. * In II. ii. 182-6.

» 538 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
power between themselves and their aggressive Western neighbours by
submitting to a unification of their parochial principalities into a
Muscovite Russian universal state. 1 The Polish-Lithuanian United
Kingdom which had once performed this anti-Muscovite task for
Western Christendom had been, like the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy,
an union sacree of marchmen which transcended the parochial loyalties
of its component peoples; but these peoples had no sooner regained their
political liberty through the outcome of the First World War than the
demon of Linguistic Nationalism, which had made its sinister epiphany
in the World during the period of their political eclipse, entered into
them and drove them to perpetrate, within twenty years, the act of
political suicide which it had taken the peoples of the Hapsburg
Monarchy a hundred years to accomplish.

After the collapse in a.d. 1918 of all the three East European Powers
that had partitioned Poland-Lithuania in a.d. 1772-95. a mclagomaniac-
ally imperialistic Polish aspiration to re-establish the frontiers of a.d.
1772 2 as park-walls for a privileged Polish nation’s Lebensraum provoked
a passionate resistance on the part of myopically parochial-minded
Lithuanians and Ukrainians who had been the Poles’ partners and not
the Poles’ subjects in the supra-national commonwealth that had been
constituted in a.d. 1569 by the Treaty of Lublin. 5 In the carving out of
an inter-war political map of Eastern Europe the Lithuanians succeeded
in establishing a short-lived independence at the cost of losing to the
Poles, by force of arms, the Jewish city and White Russian ‘corridor’
of Vilna, while the Uniate Catholic Ukrainians of Eastern Galicia and
the Orthodox Christian Ukrainians of Volhynia were annexed to an
inter-war Poland, by the same ephemerally victorious Polish force of
arms, as subject and penalized minorities. Through the deadly feuds
engendered by these tragic coups deforce that compromised the future of
both Eastern Europe and the Western Civilization in the critical years a.d.
1918-21, the evil spirit of Linguistic Nationalism prepared the way first
for a fresh partition of the historic patrimony of Poland-Lithuania in
a.d. 1939 between a Third German Reich and a Muscovy disguised as
a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and then for the establishment in
a.d. 1945 of a Russian ascendancy over the whole of this demon-ridden
area.

1 See II. ii. 157-8 and 174-7; and pp. 126-8, 398-9, and 403, above.

1 The Polish thesis that a nation which had come out on the winning side in the
World War of A.D. 1914-18 was entitled to the frontiers of a.d. 1772 would have made a
contemporary Englishman first rub his eyes and then burst out laughing when a con¬
sultation of Spruner-Menke’s historical atlas had reminded him that in a.d. 1772 one
of the frontiers of the British Empire ran along the thalweg of the Mississippi. Yet,
on the fantastic principle of Linguistic Nationalism, the Englishman’s title was a better
one than his Polish contemporary’s, since in a.d. 1918 the Englishman’s mother tongue
wag current in the United States not merely up to the line of the Mississippi but right
across North America up to the Pacific coast, whereas the Pole’s mother tongue was
current in a.d. 1018 in less than half the area that, in a.d. 1772, had been included within
the frontiers of the United Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. In a.d. 19x8 the larger part of
this area was occupied by populations whose mother tongues were Lithuanian, White
Russian, and Ukrainian, and these populations were duly claiming the right to possess
sovereign states of their own, embracing the territories in which their respective lan¬
guages were prevalent. The indisputability of Great Britain's linguistic title to reannex
the United States was Linguistic Nationalism's rcductio ad abiurdum.

a See II. ii. 175.

■ONE MAN’S MEAT ANOTHER MAN’S POISON’ 539

This havoc worked by a Modem West European refinement of a tradi¬
tional Western ideology in the East European marches of the Western
World was not so tragic as the devastating effect of the same Western
virus of Nationalism in an Ottoman body politic, since neither the fatu¬
ously licensed anarchy that had been the bane of an eighteenth-century
Poland-Lithuania nor the fitfully enlightened monarchy that had been
the palladium of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy could compare
with the Ottoman millet system in point of value as an alternative solu¬
tion for a common problem of finding a practicable political constitution
for a commonwealth consisting of geographically intermingled com¬
munities which bore a greater resemblance to the trades and professions
than to the territorially segregated nationalities of Western Europe. The
Procrustean methods of barbarism by which the Ottoman millets were
wrenched and hacked into the exotic shape of sovereign independent
national states alia Franca, in the course of a century that opened with
the extermination of the Moreot Muslims in a.d. 1821 and closed with
the eviction of the Anatolian Orthodox Christians in a.d. 1922, have
been noticed in a previous passage of this Part 1 which need not be re¬
capitulated here. In this place we have merely to point out that the no
less shocking cruelties that accompanied the partition of a British Indian
Empire into the two mutually hostile states of India and Pakistan, 1 and
a British mandated territory of Palestine into the two mutually hostile
states of Jordan and Israel, 3 on the morrow of a Second World War,
were likewise examples of the destructively explosive effect of the
Western ideology of Nationalism in social milieux in which geographi¬
cally intermingled communities had previously been enabled to live
together in virtue of being organized in millets.

The National State was not, of course, the only Modern Western
political institution that had insinuated itself into the life of contem¬
porary non-Westem societies; the Enlightened Monarchy that had
eventually been worsted by Linguistic Nationalism in the Danubian
dominions of the Hapsburgs was another Western political institution
that had also been a Western export in its day; and the secular-minded
Weltanschauung which this Late Modern Western form of autocracy had
brought in its train had anticipated the subsequent ravages of National¬
ism in the subversiveness of the effects that it had produced when it had
run amok in a post-Petrine Russia.

‘The influence of the West upon Russia was absolutely paradoxical; it
did not graft Western criteria upon the Russian spirit. On the contrary
its influence let loose violent, Dionysiac, dynamic, and sometimes de¬
moniac forces. Spirits were unshackled and revealed a dynamic force
unknown in the period before Peter. The limitless aspirations of the Faus¬
tian Man of the West, the man who belongs to modern history, in Russia
revealed themselves in an entirely peculiar way, in their own distinctive
manner, and found expression in the creations of Dostoyevsky’s genius.
The Russia which had been inherited from the past, the Russia of the
nobility, of the merchant class and the shop-keepers, which the period
of empire had kept in being, came into conflict with the Russia of the

1 On pp. 189-92, above. * See p. 204, above.

3 See pp. 290-2, above.

intelligentsia, 1 which was revolutionary and social-revolutionary in spirit,
which aspired after the infinite and sought the City which is to come.
This clash let loose dynamic forces and led to explosions. At the time
when, in the West, enlightenment and culture were establishing a sort of
order in accordance with fixed standards—although, of course, a relative
order—in Russia enlightenment and culture overthrew standards, obli¬
terated boundaries, and evoked a revolutionary dynamic.’ 2

In another context 1 we have taken a glance at the history of the Laic
Modern Western institution of Enlightened Monarchy which was to
produce these demonically explosive effects when it was let loose in
Russia without the accompaniment of those salutary checks and balances
that had kept this dispensation in order in the Western World; and we
have traced the origins of this secular form of Western autocracy back to
an ideology with which a Medieval Western Christendom was indoctri¬
nated by the Emperor Frederick II Hohcnstaufcn. In the same context
we have seen that this necromantic medieval renaissance, on Western
ground, of a post-Constantinian Hellenic ideal of autocracy was not a
feat of Western sorcery. The spirit of Caesaropapism that captivated
Frederick II’s soul was not a revenant evoked from Western Christen¬
dom’s own dead Hellenic past; it was an intruder breaking in from the
living world of an Orthodox Christian Society that was Western
Christendom’s contemporary and sister; and the magician who had
succeeded in reanimating this Late Hellenic autocracy in Orthodox
Christendom was not the thirteenth-century Swabian prince of an
East Roman Empire’s Apulo-Sicilian successor-state, but was the East
Roman Empire’s own eighth-century founder, Leo Syrus. Leo’s effective
revival of Justinian’s autocracy was a Byzantine culture-element which
made its way into a thirteenth-century Western Christendom via Sicily
and Apulia; and, coming, as it did, in isolation from its Byzantine cul¬
tural setting into an alien body social organized on a different cultural
pattern, it produced in partibus Occidentis an explosive effect which it
had never produced in an Eastern Orthodox Christian World.

The crux lay in the impossibility of making room in a thirteenth-
century Western World for this intrusive Byzantine ghost of a latter-day
Hellenic institution without pushing to the wall a Hildebrandine Papal
hierocracy which, by Frederick II Hohenstaufen’s day, was not merely
a going concern in the West but had come to be Western Christendom’s
master institution. In an earlier Part of this Study 4 w-e have already had
occasion to watch the tragic spectacle of the self-destruction of the
Medieval Western Christian order of society through a war to the knife
between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy that was precipitated
by the Stupor Mundi 's attempt to bewitch the Western World of his
day with his Byzantine political enormity. In the present place we need
only remind ourselves that this thirteenth-century internecine struggle
had had a twelfth-century overture, and that a conflict in which the

1 The origins, <thos, and significance of this unhappy social product of encounters
between contemporaries have been examined in this Study in V. v. 154-9.—A.J.T.

2 The Origin of Rustian Communism (London 1037, Bles). pp. 08-00.

1 In VII. vu. 537-9. See further X. ix. 9-14.

4 In IV. iv. 537, 540, and 560-7-

•ONE MAN’S MEAT ANOTHER MAN'S POISON’ 541
Papacy had joined forces with the North Italian city-states to resist
Frederick II's grandfather and namesake had been precipitated by
Barbarossa’s own impolitic adoption of the same exotic ideal of auto¬
cracy when this revolutionary departure from the native practice of the
feudal monarchies of Barbarossa’s own world had been suggested to
a restlessly ambitious Medieval Western mind by the impressive image
of a Late Roman Emperor’s prerogatives in the mirror of a recently
disinterred Justiniancan Corpus Iuris . 1

The destructive potentialities that culture-elements are apt to display
when they have been torn out of their original framework and been
introduced into an alien social milieu are also illustrated by examples
on the economic plane which are as striking as the political episodes
that we have just been surveying. An observer of human affairs in the
twentieth century of the Christian Era could not look around him with¬
out perceiving that the malaise that met his eyes everywhere had been
produced by the radiation of Modern Western economic techniques as
well as Modern Western political institutions. The demoralizing effect
of an imported Western Industrialism was particularly conspicuous in
South-East Asia, where an exotic industrial revolution, speeded-up by
the forced draught of importunate Western economic enterprise, had
produced a geographical mixture of socially still unannealed communities
in the process of gathering the human fuel for its economic furnace.

'Everywhere in the Modern World economic forces have strained the
relations between Capital and Labour, Industry and Agriculture, Town
and Country; but in the Modem East the strain is greater because of a
corresponding cleavage along racial lines. . . . The foreign Oriental is not
merely a buffer between European and native but a barrier between the
native and the Modem World. The cult of efficiency merely built up a
monumental Western skyscraper on Eastern soil, with the natives in the
basement; all inhabited the same country, but the building was of a differ¬
ent world, the Modern World to which the native had no access. In this
plural economy competition is much keener than in the Western World.
“There is materialism, rationalism, individualism, and a concentration on
economic ends, far more complete and absolute than in homogeneous
Western lands; a total absorption in the exchange and market, a capitalist
world with the business concern as subject, far more typical of Capitalism
than one can imagine in the so-called capitalist countries, which have
grown slowly out of the past and arc still bound to it by a hundred roots .” 1
.... Thus, although these several dependencies have in appearance been
remodelled along Western lines, they have in fact been remodelled as
economic systems, for production and not for social life. The mediaeval
state has, quite suddenly, been converted into a modem factory '.’ 3

An intrusive exotic culture-element’s potency for working havoc is
raised to its maximum when this cultural arrowhead is not only detached
from its original setting and launched as a free lance into an alien body

1 See VI. vii. 265-8; VII. vii. 538-9; and X. ix. 9.

: Boeke, Dr. J. H.: ‘Dc Economische Thcoric dcr Dualistischc Samenlcving’, in De
Economist, 1035, p. 781.

J Furnivall, J. S.: Progress and Welfare in Southeast Asia (New York 1941, Secretariat,
Institute of Pacific Relations), pp. 42-44- The picture drawn in outline in the passage
just quoted is amplified ibid., pp. 61-63.

542 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
social but is also transferred, in the act, from one plane of human activity
to another. The devastating effect of a Modern Western industrialism
imported into the economic life of South-East Asia was not so severe,
subversive though it was, as the effect of a Eurasian Nomad Pastoralism
imported into the life of a sedentary society and diverted in this alien
milieu from its proper economic function of tending live-stock to the
incongruous political enterprise of improvising a regime for the govern¬
ment of human beings. The policy of treating a conquered sedentary
population as human sheep to be shepherded with the aid of marvellously
trained human sheep-dogs, which is an obviously natural recourse for
a Nomad empire-builder in partibus agricolarum, is, of course, a
grotesquely preposterous outrage in the eyes of this pastor’s sedentary
victims; and for this reason the lives of such Nomad empires on culti¬
vated ground had, as we have seen , 1 usually been short.

The relative longevity of the Ottoman Empire is the exception that
proves this rule ; 1 and the ‘Osmanli Turkish Eurasian Nomad con¬
querors of the main body of Orthodox Christendom succeeded in
obtaining this exceptionally long lease of their human sheep-run partly
because, in this case, the conversion of a pastoral economic technique
into an instrument of government was carried out with a rare vision and
skill by shepherd-kings who were also men of genius , 3 and partly be¬
cause the sedentary society whose domain the Ottoman patriarchs
happened to overrun had previously fallen into such a desperate state
of anarchy, and had proved so hopelessly incompetent to put its own
house in order, that this grievously sick main body of Orthodox Christen¬
dom was constrained to purchase peace even at the almost prohibitively
high price of submitting to a Pax Ottomanica* The exorbitancy of the
price can be measured by the intensity of the odium which the ‘Osmanlis
incurred by their inhuman performance of an indispensable social
service . 5

(fi) ‘One Thing Leads to Another'

Our second ‘law’ of cultural radiation-and-reception 6 is the tendency
of a culture-pattern that has established itself in an emitting body social
to reassert itself in a receiving body social through a reassemblage and
reunion there of constituent culture-elements that have come to be
divorced from one another in the process of transmission. This nisus
towards reintegration has to contend with the opposing tendency of an
assaulted society to resist the penetration of alien culture-elements and
to admit them, if it must, only in the smallest possible quantities and at
the slowest possible rate . 7 Accordingly, even when some single intrusive
alien element has succeeded in opening a way for its original associates
to follow and rejoin it, the tension between the pioneer trespasser’s
constant pull and the invaded body social’s no less constant resistance
constrains the pathfinder’s old comrades, in bringing up their re¬
inforcements, to travel in Indian file, to make their entry one by one,

1 In III. iii. pp. 23-25.
4 Sec ibid., pp. 26-27.
6 See p. 530, above.

1 See ibid., pp. 27-50.

* See V. v. 348.

7 See pp. 508-21, above.

* Sec ibid., p. 26.

'ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 543
and therefore to make it, as the pathfinder element has made it in
advance, each in isolation from its pristine cultural context.

As we watch this arduous process of infiltration making a headway
that carries it to the bitter end of introducing the whole besieging host of
Midian inside a beleaguered Israel’s defences, the astonishing aspect of
this excruciating miracle is not, of course, the needle’s obstructiveness
of the camel’s importunity; it is the camel’s feat of negotiating his
passage piecemeal through the needle’s eye . 1 The assaulted body social’s
resistance to the painful and disruptive intrusion of alien culture-
elements can be taken as a matter of course. What requires explanation
is the invariably recurring failure of the defence at each successive
repetition of the attack, when the defence has achieved the initial tactical
success of compelling the assailant to disperse his forces and to dribble them
into action one by one instead of throwing in all of them simultaneously
en masse. When the assailant has thus been constrained to deploy his
troops in an order—or disorder—which is the most uneconomical way of
using his strength according to the classical theory of war, how is it
that one driblet after another actually succeeds in forcing its way through
the breach? What is the stimulus that gives each assaulting soldier in his
turn the hardihood to engage in single combat and the prowess to win
his isolated way through to his, and his comrades’, common objective?
And whence comes the prodigious discipline that prompts soldiers who
have had to break the ranks in the act of delivering their assault to per¬
form the tour de force of falling once more into their original formation
when their Han has carried them all successively into the enemy’s castle-
yard through a crevice in the curtain-wall that is too narrow to give
entry to more than one soldier at a time ?

The explanation of this miracle would appear to be that the two alter¬
native possible states—a state of integration and a state of disaggregation
—in which any given set of culture-elements may be found , 2 are not on
a par with one another in point of naturalness, normality, and healthiness.
If an integral ray of cultural radiation that has been diffracted into its
constituent elements in process of transmission from one body social
to another shows a tendency to reconstitute itself into its original pattern
after it has achieved the penetration of an obstacle which it has had to
penetrate piecemeal, does not this tendency towards reintegration signify
that the relatively complex state in which the primary culture-elements
constitute an integrated pattern is in some sense more natural, more
normal, and more healthy than the relatively simple state in which each
of the primary culture-elements goes its own separate way without
there being any mutual relation of reciprocity and interdependence
between any one element and the rest ?

If a mutual attraction towards combining to constitute a culture-
pattern is a natural property of culture-elements which normally holds
its own against a counter-tendency towards a spontaneous dissolution
of their partnership , 1 this would account for a tendency to recombine
when the partnership has been dissolved forcibly by the disruptive pro¬
cess of diffraction, and we should have put our finger here upon an

1 Matt. xix. 24. 2 See pp. 495-501, above. > See p. 498, above.

544 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
explanation of the impulse that moves the elemental rays of a diffracted
integral ray of cultural radiation to follow one another through any
breach in the defences of an assaulted body social into which any one
of their number has once pushed its way, and to reassociate with one
another in their original formation when they have completed their re¬
assemblage on the farther side of a cultural Maginot Line which they
have carried by means of a succession of individual assaults.

If this gregarious instinct that thus seems to be inherent in the nature
of a primary culture-element is as deep-seated and as dynamic as the
evidence indicates, this in turn would explain an apparent paradox in
the assaulted party's usual reaction to the aggressor’s attack. The usual
course of an encounter between contemporaries in which the assailant’s
forlorn hope has once made a lodgement within the assaulted party’s
defences is a mechanical resolution of the opposing forces at work in the
tension between the intrusive elements’ successful efforts in a winning
battle to rejoin one another and the invaded society’s unsuccessful efforts
in a losing battle to keep each and all of the intrusive elements at arm’s
length; and this ineffectual kicking against the pricks in a struggle of
which the outcome is a foregone conclusion defeats the recalcitrant
victim’s intentions and falsifies his expectations 1 by producing the
untoward result of ensuring that his inevitable sufferings shall be of a
maximum severity. It ensures, in fact, that the agonizing social and
spiritual cancer started by the successful lodgement of the first single
pioneer intrusive culture-element shall take, when once started, the
longest possible time to run its dreadful course; and that, throughout
this maximum Time-span, the devastating process of cultural invasion
shall be perpetually extending its range and accentuating its effect in the
invaded society’s tormented body social . 2

At first thoughts an observer of this strange tragedy might perhaps
have expected that the painfulness of the initial experience of invasion
by an exotic culture-element would have provided its own remedy by
impelling the patient to make sure that this initial invasion should have

> See III. iii. 152 .

2 This Utter rule is subject to exceptions which may occur if and when, after the act
of cultural penetration has taken place, but before it has made any considerable progress,
the impinging society disintegrates to a degree at which it becomes impotent to carry
its cultural invasion of the assaulted alien body social any farther. If this situation arises,
it offers to the aggressor society’s victim a chance of giving a distinctive turn of its own
to those elements of the exotic culture that have succeeded in making a lodgement in
its body by that time. Classical cases in point arc the histories of the Russian branch of
an Onhodox Christendom and the Japanese branch of the Far F.astem Civilization. The
Russian and Japanese converts to these two civilizations had been mere barbarians at
the time of their conversion, and might therefore have been expected a priori to be more
docile in their adoption of the invading exotic way of life than, for example, the Celtic
or the Scandinavian converts to the Western Christian Civilization, who, before their
conversion, had created at least the rudiments of distinctive civilizations of their own.
Russian and Japanese history took a different turn from this because the main bodies of
the Onhodox Christian and the For Eastern Society broke down and went into dis¬
integration at a time when their branches—which had struck root in the ground of
Russia and Japan like the drooping branches of a banyan tree—were still tender shoots.
The Russian branch of Orthodox Christendom and the Japanese branch of the Far
Eastern Civilization did duly show their solidarity with their parent stems to the extent
of following them into decline; but they went on to assert a distinctive cultural indi¬
viduality of their own by the dismal process of going through a disintegrating civiliza-
tions normal experiences of a Time of Troubles and a universal state on independent
lines.

‘ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 545
no sequel. When a child has burnt its fingers, we should expect it to
stop playing with fire. Why was it, then, that, in the classical examples
presented by those encounters with the West which all the living non-
Wcstern societies had been experiencing in the Modern Age of Western
history, every victim of the Modern Western Civilization’s cultural
radioactivity which had once allowed some importunate Western tech¬
nique, institution, or idea to gain a foothold within the non-Western
victim’s defences should invariably have gone on to give admission to
one further Western culture-element after another, in spite of the
suffering and loss that this piecemeal reception of alien elements had
brought with it from the start ? The truth in all these cases is, of course,
that the victim was not courting a maximum experience of torment
deliberately, but was incurring it through force majeure. In falling back
from one position to another, he was not making a masterly retreat
according to plan; he was helplessly ‘on the run’.

Assaulted societies are not always blind to the consequences that are
likely to follow from allowing even the most apparently trivial and
innocuous exotic culture-clement to make an entry. We have already
taken note 1 of certain historic encounters in which an assaulted society
has succeeded in repulsing its assailant’s attack without having given him
a chance of making even a temporary lodgement; and an uncompromis¬
ing policy of self-insulation that has won these rare victories has also
been tried in many other cases where it has proved a failure. This policy
is the practical expression of a spirit of ‘Zealotism’ which is, as we shall
see, 2 one of the alternative possible psychological responses to the
challenge of a cultural assault; and, while a ‘Zealot’s’ characteristic fithos
is emotional and intuitive, there have also been ‘Zealots’ who have been
led to adopt a policy of isolationism by a train of reasoning from an
empirical discovery of the truth that cultural intercourse is governed by
the social law that ‘one thing leads to another’. A classic case of this
rationalist variety of ‘Zealotism’ is the severance of relations between
Japan and the Western World that was gradually carried through, after
careful investigation and mature reflexion at every stage, by Hideyoshi
and his Tokugawan successors in the course of the fifty-one years ending
in a.d. 1638. It is more surprising to find a similar awareness of the in¬
herent interdependence of all the divers elements in an intrusive alien
culture-pattern leading, by a similar train of reasoning, to a similar con¬
clusion in the mind of an old-fashioned ruler of a secluded and backward
Arab country.

The rationalist ‘Zealot’s’ state of mind is piquantly illustrated by a con¬
versation which took place in the nineteen-twenties between the Zaydl
Im 5 m Yahya of San'a and a British envoy whose mission was to persuade
the Imam to restore peacefully a portion of the British Aden Protector¬
ate which he had occupied during the World War of a.d. 1914-18 and
had refused to evacuate thereafter, notwithstanding the defeat of his
Ottoman overlords. In a final interview with the Im 5 m, after it had be¬
come apparent that the mission would not attain its object, the British
envoy, wishing to give the conversation another turn, complimented
* On pp. 476-7, above. 2 On pp. 581-2, below.

S46 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
the Im 5 m upon the soldierly appearance of his new-model army. Seeing
that the Imam took the compliment in good part, he went on:

‘And I suppose you will be adopting other Western institutions as well ?’

‘I think not,’ said the Imam with a smile.

‘Oh, really? That interests me. And may I venture to ask your reasons ?’

‘Well, I don’t think I should like other Western institutions,’ said the
Imam.

‘Indeed? And what institutions, for example?’

‘Well, there are parliaments,’ said the Imam. ‘I like to be the Govern¬
ment myself. I might find a parliament tiresome.’

‘Why, as for that,’ said the Englishman, 'I can assure you that respon¬
sible parliamentary representative government is not an indispensable
part of the apparatus of our Western Civilization. Look at Italy. She has
given that up, and she is one of the great Western Powers.’

‘Well, then there is alcohol,’ said the Imam. 'I don’t want to see that
introduced into my country, where at present it is happily almost un¬
known.’

‘Very natural,’ said the Englishman; ‘but, if it comes to that, I can
assure you that alcohol is not an indispensable adjunct of Western Civiliza¬
tion cither. Look at America. She has given up that, and she too is one of
the great Western Powers.’

‘Well, anyhow,’ said the Irndm, with another smile which seemed to
intimate that the conversation was at an end, ‘I don’t like parliaments and
alcohol and that kind of thing’

The Englishman could not make out whether there was any suggestion
of humour in the parting smile with which the Im 5 m’s last words were
uttered; but, however that might be, those words went to the heart of
the matter and showed that the inquiry about possible further Western
innovations at San ‘5 had been more pertinent than the Imam might
have cared to admit. Those words indicated, in fact, that the Imam,
viewing the Western Civilization from a great way off, saw it, in that
distant perspective, as something one and indivisible and recognized
certain features of it which to a Westerner’s eye would appear to have
nothing whatever to do with one another—the West’s addiction to
alcoholic beverages and its addiction to parliamentary institutions—as
being organically related parts of that indivisible whole.

The moral of this story is that, in manifesting the perspicacity of his
intellectual insight, the Imam YahyJ had implicitly indicted the infirmity
of his purpose. In revealing his cognizance of the social ‘law’ that, in
cultural intercourse, ‘one thing leads to another’, he had tacitly admitted
that, in wcak-mindedly abandoning his own principles to the extent of
adopting even just the rudiments of a Western military technique, he had
already introduced into the life of his people the thin end of a wedge
which in time would inexorably cleave their close-compacted traditional
Islamic Civilization asunder. He had started a cultural revolution which
would leave the Yamanites, in the end, with no alternative but to cover
their nakedness with a complete ready-made outfit of Western clothes.

If the Imam had met his Hindu contemporary the Mahatma Gandhi,
that is what he would have been told by a Hindu statesman-saint who
could have spoken with the double authority of genius and experience.

•ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 547
The moral which the Imam YahyS had failed or refused to draw had been
duly drawn by Gandhi, with his seer’s eye, from his own divination of
the inherent tendency of diffracted culture-elements to reassemble in
their pristine formation. Gandhi had understood that an assaulted
society which intended to strive in earnest for the preservation of its
cultural integrity could not afford to make one single concession to its
assailant—not even the clever-seeming feint of yielding so far as to adopt
the aggressor’s military technique with a view to thus enabling itself to
mount a counter-offensive on less unequal terms. Such purposive
feigned retreats were apt, the Mahatma perceived, to degenerate into
routs that were as genuine as they were involuntary; and accordingly
Gandhi exhorted the Hindu Society of his day to cut the threads binding
it to the Western World by renouncing, not only the importation from
Great Britain, but also, even more firmly, the still more gravely com¬
promising manufacture in India, of machine-made cotton yam and
cotton cloth. 1

In calling upon his fellow Hindus to revert to spinning and weaving
their cotton by hand, Gandhi was indeed showing them the way to
extricate themselves from the visible meshes of a Western economic
spider’s web; but this Gandhian policy of total economic divorce from
the West was based on two assumptions which must both be justified in
the event if the policy was to achieve its aim; and neither of these
assumptions actually proved able to stand this searching test of experi¬
ence. The first assumption was that the Hindus of Gandhi’s generation
would be prepared to make the economic sacrifices demanded by the
Gandhian prescription for purchasing immunity from a Western cul¬
tural virus, and on this point the Hindu prophet failed to carry his
people with him. The Hindu masses could not bear to condemn them¬
selves to a self-imposed depression of their material standard of living
below its present abysmal nadir, while the Hindu textile manufacturers
at Bombay and at Gandhi’s second home, Ahmadabad, would not forgo
the profits which they were earning by the mass-production of cheap
cotton goods. Since the party funds of the Indian Congress were largely
provided by free-will offerings of a fraction of these profits of Indian
industry alia Franca, Gandhi’s policy was virtually doomed to defeat; 2
but, even if Gandhi had not been disappointed in his high expectations
of his countrymen’s economic disinterestedness, his policy would still
have been brought to naught by the falsity of its second implicit assump¬
tion, which was not a miscalculation of the assaulted society’s moral
capacity, but was a misapprehension of the intrusive alien culture’s
spiritual quality.

The error in Gandhi’s diagnosis here was that in this context he was
allowing himself to see nothing more in the Late Modern Western
Civilization than the secular social structure, with Technology substi¬
tuted for Religion as the key-stone of the social arch, which the West in
Gandhi’s day self-complacently proclaimed itself to be. If the cultural
radiation, emanating from the West, that was bombarding India in
Gandhi’s day had been in truth exclusively technological in its texture,

» See III. iii. 190 . 1 See III. iii. 203.

548 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
then Gandhi’s policy of rendering the Hindu body social totally im¬
pervious to penetration by technological culture-rays of Western pro¬
venance might have proved an effective solution of the Hindu Society’s
Western problem, supposing that Gandhi had been successful in
securing his people’s effective support in this campaign. The baffling
feature to which Gandhi seems—to judge by his policy—to have been
blind in his scrutiny of contemporary Western cultural phenomena was
the political and spiritual corona that was playing round the fringe of
a self-eclipsed cultural sun’s perversely darkened disk. This irrepressible
khvarenah 1 continued to bear visual witness to the truth that spiritual
suicide is not an easy crime to commit ; 2 and it is the more strange that
Gandhi, of all men, should have been blind to this portent, seeing that
these clouds of Western glory had demonstrated their radioactive
potency ad hominem by gathering round the Hindu prophet’s own head
and illuminating his own heart.

Gandhi’s masterly use of contemporary Western methods of political
organisation, publicity, and propaganda 3 to serve his campaign against
the compromising use of Western methods of economic production
might perhaps be dismissed as one of the ironic curiosities of history;
but an open-eyed and candid-minded observer, Occidental or Hindu,
could hardly refuse to take seriously the manifest conquest of Gandhi’s
soul by the undying spirit of a Christianity which had been repudiated
by a majority of its Late Modern Western carriers. The spiritual event
that had liberated Gandhi’s creative ‘soul-force’ was an encounter, in the
sanctuary of this sublime Hindu soul, between the spirit of Hinduism
and the spirit of the Christian Gospel embodied in the life of the
Society of Friends . 4 A cultural barrage designed to keep out the power-
loom was no obstacle to the entry of the Inner Light; and the captivation
of Gandhi’s soul by an alien culture on the religious plane was as decisive
as it was auspicious.

The truth is that, if once the besieged have permitted even one isolated
member of the besiegers’ storming column to force his way inside their
enceinte, their only remaining chance of saving their fortress from
ultimately falling is to take the intruder prisoner before any of his
eagerly following comrades-in-arms have had time to rejoin and re-

* 'Hallowed by the halo of the Khvarenah' might perhaps be the common meaning of

the Hittitc word kouimanat denoting a client prince of a Hittite emperor who styled

himself ‘the Sun’ (see Delaporte, L.: Lei Hittites (Paris 1936, La Renaissance du Livre),
p. 187), the Greek words xoipavos and Kopiov oy {Maudomci Kdpavot: sec I. i. 400, n. 1),
and the Persian word xdpavos, which, according to Xenophon, Htlltnica. Book I, chap, iv,

§ 3, was the official title borne by Cyrus the Younger as viceroy of an Anatolian military
district of the Achnemeninn Empire (See VI. vii. 183, n. 7, and VI. vii. 673-4). Did this
Persian title survive in the family name of the House of Kirin, which, under the
Arsacid and Sasanid regimes, ranked as the second family in the Empire after the
reigning dynasty itself? And, if Kirin stands for napaws, does Suren stand for s eren
(Groeci rvpavyos), the title given to 'the Lords of the Philistines’ in the Hebrew text of
the Old Testament? (Sec Macalister, R. A. S.: The Philistines (London 1913, Milford),
P- 79 >-

2 'Just as the corona asserts the fact that the Sun is not actually engulfed but only
darkened, so there arc certain marginal events or intuitions which inform the individual,
temporarily engulfed by the Unconscious, that the light of Consciousness will emerge
again’ (Baynes, H. G.: Mythology 0/ the Soul (London 1940, Bailliirc, Tindall & Cox;
1949, Methuen), p. 557 ).

J See III. ui. 203. * * * § Sec III. iii. 190-1 and V. v. 190.

'ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 549
inforce the audacious pioneer. An intrusive alien culture-element cannot
easily be purged of its dangerous capacity for attracting to itself other
elements, of the same provenance, with which it was associated in its
original cultural setting. The rash recipient’s only chance of demagnetiz¬
ing his formidable acquisition is to metabolize and assimilate it to a
degree at which it becomes amenable to being worked into his native
cultural pattern as an enrichment and not a dissolvent of the prevailing
harmony. If the intrusive alien element succeeds in defeating the opera¬
tions of its host’s digestive system by retaining its magnetic alien quality
after lodgement, the unhappy host will find himself condemned to look
on helplessly while the defiantly intrusive culture-element behaves in his
body social like a loose electron disintegrating an atom or like a cuckoo’s
egg laid in a hedge-sparrow’s nest . 1

The changeling chick into which this alien egg hatches out provides
for the satisfaction of its own inordinate appetite by insisting on its
foster parents’ making this the first call on their energies, at the expense
of their duty to their own brood; and the ruthless interloper makes room
in the diminutive nest for its own disproportionately expanding body by
throwing its foster-brothers out, one by one, until a nest which the
parent hedge-sparrows have built for the rearing of their own young has
been turned by the presence of the intruder into an incubator for pro¬
pagating the absentee parent cuckoos’ species through the hoodwinked
and brow-beaten hedge-sparrows’ misguided ministrations. At this far-
gone stage in the lamentable game the parent hedge-sparrows are con¬
strained to acquiesce in the servitude of foster-parenthood as the one
mission in life still open to them—even though their one foster-chick
happens to be the murderer of their own progeny.

In general terms of encounters between civilizations, this is to say
that, when the assaulted party has failed to prevent even one single
pioneer element of the aggressively radioactive culture from making a
lodgement in his body social, and when he has furthermore failed to
isolate and sterilize this alien entering wedge by metabolizing and
assimilating it, his only chance of social survival lies in making a psycho¬
logical volte face. He may still be able to save himself alive by abandoning
the ‘Zealot’ attitude of tooth-and-nail opposition to an irresistible in¬
vader’s inexorable advance and adopting, instead, the ‘Herodian’s’
opposite tactics 2 of learning to fight a militarily superior adversary with
his own weapons, as a prelude to winning his goodwill by welcoming
him with open arms. In the particular terms of the encounter between
the ‘Osmanlis and the Late Modern West the moral would be that
Sultan ‘Abd-al-Hamld’s grudging policy of Westernization at a mini¬
mum was never practical politics when once the invading Western
culture had forced its way through the Porte and entrenched itself in the
Ottoman Imperial Government’s war department , 3 whereas Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk’s whole-hearted policy of Westernization to a maximum 4
offered the ‘Osmanlis a just practicable way of salvation even when adopted
as a last resort at the eleventh hour.

1 Sec the instances cited in V. vi. 106-7.
J See pp. 234-6, above.

2 See pp. 582-4, below.
* See pp. 263-8, above.

550 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

The Ottoman and the Russian Society’s experiences in their en¬
counters with a Late Modem Western Civilization afford classical
illustrations of the incfficacy of the principle of homoeopathic medicine
when the virus to which the patient is trying to make himself immune is
a cultural infection. Peter the Great in Russia, Mehmed 'All in Egypt,
and Mahmud II in Turkey each in turn began by setting himself the
limited objective of Westernizing his fighting forces in order to be able
to hold his own militarily and diplomatically in a Westernizing World;
and in each case the act of self-inoculation with a serum extracted from
the contemporary Western art of war, so far from conferring the hoped-
for immunity, started a galloping consumption. In Melimed ‘All’s
Egypt the potency of a Westernized army’s contagious cultural effect in
promoting the Westernization of the rest of the body social was recog¬
nized in retrospect by an able British observer when Mehmed ‘All had
been master of Egypt for a third of a century.

‘At an early period of his military career, Mahomet Ali saw enough to
convince him of the superiority of European tactics over those of the East;
for he was himself engaged against the French Army in Egypt, and con¬
ceived a high opinion of the value of martial science. But the introduction
of Western organisation into the armies of the Levant brought with it
other important results; for the appliances of mechanical art.of education,
of medical knowledge, and a general system of dependence and subordina¬
tion, were the needful companions of the new state of things. The transfer
of the military power from unruly and undisciplined hordes to a body of
troops regularly trained through the various grades of obedience and
discipline was in itself the establishment of a principle of order which
spread over the whole surface of Society . 1

In Egypt, Turkey, and Russia alike the sequel to the Westernization of
the fighting forces from above downwards by an autocrat’s fiat demon¬
strated that this new departure in the military field could not be followed
out effectively to its own intendedly limited objective unless it were also
followed up and supported by a series of further new departures, in
the same Westernizing direction, in other departments of social life.

A fighting force of the genuine Late Modern Western quality could
not be brought into being without provision for the professional training
of a corps of officers in accordance with the Western standard of the
day , 2 and it could not be kept in being without provision for a medical

1 Bowring, John: Report on Egypt and Candia dated the 27th March, 1839, and
addressed to the Right Hon. Lord Viscount Palmerston (London 1840, Clowes &
Clowes), p. 49. This British visitor’s judgement was confirmed by the contemporary
testimony of the French physician A. B. Clot, who had spent fifteen years of his working
life in Mehmed 'All's service (see his Aperfu Gintral stir VEgypte (Paris 1840, Fortin
and Masson, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. vi). Clot Bey’s dictum (ibid., vol. ii. p. 199) that in Egypt,
as Mehmed 'Alt found it, 'tout dtait a fairc, ct tout a commence a *tre fait i la suite de
l’organi ration militnjre', has been quoted already on p. 234, above. In the same pas¬
sage, Clot Bey credits his Rumeliot Turkish employer’s new model army alia Franca
with the two particular achievements of having created order in Egypt and having in¬
spired the native Egyptians with a national consciousness.

1 In Mehmed ‘Ali s new-model army there was a systematic provision for the general
education of the conscripts in the ranks during their perioji of service (Bowring, j.:
Report on the Commercial Statistics 0] Syria, dated the 17th July, 1839 (London 1840,
Clowes), p. 109), as well as a preparatory system of professional education for officer-
cadets.

‘ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 551
service to look after the physical welfare of the rank-and-file of a stand¬
ing army or navy living at close quarters under unnatural conditions . 1
It proved impossible, however, as we have seen,* to confine the Western
education of military and naval officers in a non-Western society to a pro¬
fessionally indispensable minimum of technical instruction when their
autocratic master was so unintelligent as to be able to delude himself,
first, into imagining that it would be within his power thus to blinker
the mental vision of his cadets and then into flattering himself that the
robot human product of his fancy would have been capable—had it been
possible for him to produce it in real life—of fulfilling its professional
mission of holding its own against the less illiberally educated officers’
corps of Western or Westernizing neighbours.

We have noticed the nemesis by which Sultan ‘Abd-al-Hamid II’s
delusion was overtaken and confuted in a.d. 1908 when a political revolu¬
tion that cost him his throne was led by junior officers who had acquired
their ‘dangerous thoughts’ at this fatuously unenlightened Ottoman
despot’s painfully sterilized military academy. It is more surprising to
find military officers leading abortive political revolutionary movements
in Egypt in a.d. 1879-82 and in Russia in a.d. 1825, 3 considering that
‘Abd-al-Hamid’s delusion had not ever clouded the clearer spirits of
a Mehmed ‘All or a Peter. So far from seeking to confine the Western
education of their subjects to a strictly technical minimum training of
naval and military cadets, these two Herodian-minded men of genius
were tempted to plunge out of their depth in the abuse of their auto¬
cratic power by exerting it for the opposite purpose of driving their
subjects into a Western course of education on a front that they
were perpetually extending ; 4 and this progressive widening of their

1 Hcllmuth von Moltkc, when attached to HSfiz Pasha’s Turkish army in a.d. 1839,
was struck by the magnitude of the rate of sickness among the troops, notwithstanding
the excellence of their conditions of life (Briefe uber Zuttande und Begebtnheiun in der
Ttirkci aus den Jahren 1835 bit 1839 (Berlin, Posen, & Bromberg 184:, Mittler), p. 301).
He estimated this army’s average peace-time losses by death from sickness at 33$ per
cent, for oil arms (ibid., pp. 350-1) and at 50 per cent, for the infantry (ibid., p. 382).

1 On pp. 232-8, above.

1 Sec pp. 234-5, above. In the issue of Le Monde Slave for December 1925 (Nou-
velle Sdrie, 2 rac Annde, No. 12, Paris 1925, Alcan), which is devoted to 'le Centenaire
des Ddcabristcs’, it is pointed out (p. 345) that the Decembrists were the last military
conspirators and the first political theorists in the history of Petrine Russia. In the
eighteenth century there had been five Russian palace revolutions (in a.d. 1725, 1730,
1740, 1741, 1761), all led by guards officers recruited from the nobility, and the revolu¬
tion of a.d. x8ot had been of the same character (ibid., p. 335). The Decembrists, whose
abortive revolution in December 1825 marked the sociological transition in Russia to
a revolutionary movement of a new type, were representatives of the fifth of the eight
generations spanning the period between the date of Peter the Great’s death and the
year a.d. xosc (ibid., p. 334)- Perhaps one reason why the abortive liberal revolution of
a.d. 1825 in Russia had military officers for its leaders, notwithstanding the impulse
given by Peter the Great, a hundred years before the Decembrists’ day, to civilian as
well as military education on Western lines, was that, as a result of the part which Russia
was forced, by French aggression, to play in the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian military
officers of that generation had been brought into more direct personal touch with the
West than the majority of their Russian contemporaries of the same Western-educated
class in civilian life. The effect on the Decembrists’ outlook that was produced by their
service abroad on Western ground, where the contrast between the Western World and
a superficially Westernized Russia made its impression on their minds with all the
sharpness of a first-hand experience, is noticed in the study here cited (Le Monde Slave.
num. cit., pp. 336, 338, 351, and 376). The effect was particularly strong in the case
of those Russian officers who took part in the occupation of Paris in a.d. ,8, 4 - „

* Mehmed Ah, like Peter, used the moral pull of his own personal example, as well

552 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
educational programme is the more remarkable considering that it was
dictated to them by their practical experience in the pursuit of educa¬
tional aims which, in intention, were strictly, and indeed narrowly,
utilitarian from first to last.

Both Peter and Mehmed ‘All were led towards their ambitious
Herodian educational objective along two convergent routes. On the
one hand they both realized that, in order to secure an intake of military
and naval cadets equipped with a general cultivation in the Western
style as a background for their technical training in a Western art, they
must create a reservoir of boys endowed with a preparatory educa¬
tion on these non-tcchnical Western lines. On the other hand they both
also realized that, however effective an education they might succeed in
providing in their naval and military cadet schools and in the civilian
preparatory schools leading up to them, these new institutions by them¬
selves would not avail to produce and maintain those fighting forces of a
Western pattern and standard that were the practical object of their
educational endeavours. Such fighting forces required auxiliary services
which in turn required a special technically trained personnel; this
expensively elaborate establishment could not be kept up without an
expansion of the public revenue; the revenue could not be expanded
without a rise in the taxable income of the community; production could
not be increased without technical improvements in agriculture and
industry; 1 none of these requirements could be met without providing a
further personnel of Western-educated civil servants and economic
experts; and the requisite intake of civilian cadets could only be secured
by furnishing the general preparatory education alia Franca which was
likewise a necessary condition for ensuring a supply of naval and military
cadets of the proper quality.

In Mehmed ‘All’s Egypt the Westernization of education ‘was in origin
the natural corollary to the reform of the Army’. 1 The infantry’, cavalry,
and artillery schools under Western commandants, which we have noticed
in an earlier chapter of this Part, 3 were supplemented by engineering

as the physical push of political coercion, as a means of moving his subjects to take the
Westward road. The celebrated initiative shown by Peter in mastering one branch of
contemporary Western technology after another has been noticed in an earlier passage
of this Study (in III. ui. 279-80) and needs no further exposition here. Mehmed 'All,
who had grown up without being educated even in the Islamic culture that was his own
social heritage, and who never mastered any other language beyond his native Turkish,
picked up an acquaintance with the contemporary Western Civilization by taking oppor¬
tunities of talking to Frankish visitors, learnt to read at the age of forty-five, and studied
the histories of Alexander the Great and Napoleon (Clot, op. cit., vol. i, p. lxxvii).
Moreover, this Ottoman apostle of Westernization was more fortunate than his Mus¬
covite counterpart in finding an enthusiastic disciple, and not a sullen opponent, in his
eldest son and heir. Ibrihim Pasha was energetic, orderly minded, and Petrine in his
practice of sharing the hardships of his soldiers on campaign (ibid., p. Ixxxiii). He had
been educated to read and write Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, and he was versed in
Islamic history (ibid., p. Ixxx). He gave a lead to his officers in schooling himself in the
Western art of war (ibid., p. lxxxi), and also showed 2 practical interest in the improve¬
ment of Egyptian agriculture on Western lines (ibid., p. Ixxxiv). Another of Mehmed
'Aii’s sons, Sa'id, learnt to speak French fluently and received a mathematical education
as the basis for his professional training as a naval officer (ibid., p. Ixxxv).

1 Mehmed ‘All’s policy of Westernization on the economic plane has been touched
upon on p. 240, above.

1 Dodwcll, H.: The Founder of Modern Egypt (Cambridge 1931, University Press),
P* * 37 - J On pp. 243-4, «bove.

'ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 553
and naval schools 1 and were reinforced by the establishment, in the
citadel of Cairo, of a mathematical and drawing school under an Italian
master 2 and a cannon foundry under a Turkish manager, Edhem Bey,
whose intellectual and administrative gifts won high praise from the
Duke of Ragusa (alias A. F. L. V. de Marmont, the Napoleonic French
marshal); 3 and the technical training of personnel for Mehmcd ‘All’s
fighting forces and their auxiliary services was underpinned by the
introduction of a system of general education alia Franca in Egypt itself
and was at the same time improved in quality by arrangements for
enabling an elite of the students to pursue courses of Western study on
Western ground.

As early in Mehmed ‘All’s reign as a.d. 1812, a school was opened in
Cairo by his director of the supply of materials, Muhammad Efendi
Tubbal. 4 In a.d. 1816 the Pasha himself opened a school of engineering
and surveying in his own palace with eighty Egyptian students and with
Western instructors and instruments. 5 In a.d. 1833 a polytechnic was
founded, as a preparatory school for the military cadet colleges, with two
French, two Armenian, and six Muslim instructors; 6 primary schools
were founded at Cairo and Alexandria to feed the polytechnic; several
local schools were also established in each provincial miidirlik; and these
educational establishments at divers levels were so many rungs in a ladder
leading up to the public service. 7 The year a.d. 1836 saw the inaugura¬
tion of a French-inspired Council of Education ( Majlis-al-Ma'Srif)
administering fifty elementary and secondary schools distributed over
the country. The pupils of these schools were recruited by conscription 8
and the secondary schools were organized on military lines \ 9 but, on the
other side of the account, these schoolboy-conscripts enjoyed the advan¬
tage of drawing pay and rations from the Government. 10

In reply to a questionnaire drafted by Bowring when he was collecting
materials for the report which he submitted to Lord Palmerston in a.d.
1839, Mukhtar Bey, an official in Mehmed ‘All’s sendee, made a return
of the number of pupils receiving instruction at the time in non-military
special schools in the Pasha’s dominions. According to this statement
there were then 300 pupils in the medical school, 120 in the veterinary

* Sec Dodwell, H.: The Founder of Modern Egypt (Cambridge 1931, University
Press), p. 238. Native Egyptians were not accepted as candidates for entry into the cadet
schools at Cairo and Alexandria (Kramers, J. H.: s.v. ‘Khediw’, in the Encyclopaedia of
Islam, vol. ii (London 1927, Luzac), p. 952).

* See Dodwell, op. cit., p. 238.

> See Clot, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 206-7. The same highly qualified foreign observer
also praised Mehmed 'All's small-arms factories, which were organized on a French
model (ibid., vol. ii, pp. 277-8).

* See Jabarti, Shaykh 'Abd-ar-RahmSn al-: Ajd'ib-al-Alhdr fi'l-Tardjimtea’lAkhbdr
(French translation, Paris 1888-96, Lcroux, 9 vols.), vol. yiii, p. 373.

s See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, p. 192. Jabarti records (in op. cit., vol. ix, on p. 207)
that, in opening his first school, Mehmed ‘Ali had been acting on the suggestion of a
Muslim traveller, linguist, and man of science named Hasan Darwlsh al-Mawsill, who
made the welfare of the poorer students his particular personal concern. A master was
brought from Turkey to teach pupils whose mother tongue was not Arabic.

6 See Dodwell, op. cit., p. 238. Three of the Muslim instructors had been educated
in France, and three in England.

’ See ibid.

8 See Bowring, Report on Egypt and Candia, p. 135.

* See ibid., p. 128.

>® See ibid., p. 126.

554 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
school, 225 in the polytechnic, 150 in the school of Western languages,
150 in the school of music, 50 in the school of agriculture, 20 in the
school of midwifery, and 300 in the school of book-keeping. The num¬
bers of students in the schools of agriculture and midwifery were to be
increased—in the latter school from 20 to 100. ' This systematic network
of special and general educational institutions on Western lines 2 was
eventually completed in a.d. 1867. 3 The extent and the limits of this
progressive broadening of a Westernizing educational system that had
been introduced originally for the particular technical purpose of creat¬
ing a new-model army go far to explain, between them, both the sub¬
sequent rise of a nationalist movement in the ranks of a callow Egyptian
intelligentsia and the failure of this movement, at its first outbreak under
‘Arabi’s leadership, owing to its inability at this stage to enlist the sup¬
port of the illiterate masses of the peasantry, from whom the intelligent¬
sia had become culturally alienated in the act of imbibing the tincture of
Western culture that was the intelligentsia’s distinctive hall-mark and
raison d'itre?

Side by side with this development of education alia Franca in
Egypt itself, Mehmed ‘Alt and his successors maintained, from a.d.
1826 to circa a.d. 1870, an Egyptian Scientific Mission {Al-Ba'that-al-
'Ilmiyah ) in Paris. 3 The first batch of students to benefit by this scheme,
who were sent to Paris in a.d. 1826, 4 were placed under the superinten¬
dence of Jomard, the French official commissioner for the publication
of the discoveries of the Napoleonic Institut d’figypte. There were
forty-four of thcm, s all native Egyptians; 6 and they were followed in the
years a.d. 1827-33 by other batches, amounting to about sixty students
in all, 7 consisting likewise mostly of fallahln. 8 One hundred and fourteen
students, in all, had been sent from Egy pt to Paris by a.d. 1840, the date
of publication of Clot Bey’s book. 9

The same educational policies were pursued with greater violence in
Petrine Russia. 10 Like Mehmed ‘All, Peter found it impossible to start

' Sec Bowring, Report on Egypt and Candia, p. 194.

1 The particular Western lines followed in Egypt were the French (Bowring, op. cit.,
p. 125).

* Sec Kramers, ibid., p. 952.

* These were not actually the first Egyptian Muslim students to go to the West.
They had predecessors who had already studied in Italy and France; and one of these,
'Uthmin Efendi NQr-ad-Dfn, who had been appointed head of a college at Qasr-al-*Ayn,
founded a staif school at Khtinqih in a.d. 1826 (Clot, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 312).

5 See Clot, op. cit,, vol. ii, p. 313. Dodwell, op. cit., p. 203, gives the number as
forty-five on the authority of a dispatch of the 4th April, 1826. from Salt, the British
Consul-General in Egypt at the time (F.O. 78/147); but Cloths figure is more worthy of
credence, since he gives the details. Eleven of the students in this batch were trained
in administration and diplomacy, 8 in navigation, military engineering, and gunnery; 2
in medicine ar.d surgery; 5 in agriculture, mining, and natural history; 4 in chemistry;
4 in hydraulics and metallurgy; 3 in engraving and lithography; 1 in translation; and 1
in architecture, while 5 went back to Egypt without having qualified in any discipline.

6 See Dodwell, op. cit., p. 203.

7 The batch sent to Paris in a.d. 1833 was twelve strong (Bowring, op. cit., p. 140).

* See Clot., op. cit., vol. ii, p. 313. Out of these later batches of Egyptian students
sent to Pans, forty students were allocated to mechanical arts and twelve to pharmacy
and medicine.

» See Clot, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 313. Besides the students at Paris, there were at this time
also Egyptian apprentices in France at Elboeuf and at Rheims (Bowring, op. cit., p. 42).

•0 Education by force was the key-note of Petrine educational policy (see Mettig, C.:
Die Eu’opehnerung Ruislands im 18. Jahrliundtrle (Gotha 1913, Perthes), p. 80).

'ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 555
the process of Westernization without importing Western experts; 1 but
Peter’s ambition likewise 2 was to replace these aliens as soon as possible
by Western-trained subjects of his own; and in Russia, as in Egypt, the
education of native officers for Westernized fighting services was re¬
inforced by a training of native technicians for Westernized auxiliary
sendees. A school of navigation, for example, was opened at Moscow in
a.d. 1701, under the direction of a Scottish mathematician from Aber¬
deen named Farquharson, whose Russian pupils were recruited from
children of all classes; 3 and a technical education was forced upon all
male members of the Russian nobility by an edict of a.d. 1714 for¬
bidding them to marry till they had passed an examination in geo¬
metry, arithmetic, and navigation. 4 In a.d. 1736 compulsory education,
between the ages of seven and twenty, was imposed on all noblemen’s
sons, and these aristocratic educational conscripts were subjected to
a series of three examinations, with compulsory service in the ranks of
the Army as the penalty for failing to pass.* A corps of pages was
founded in a.d. 1730 6 and a cadet corps in a.d. 1731, 7 and garrison
schools were started in a.d. 1732. 7 Schools for non-Christian subjects
of the Russian Empire were founded at Astrakhan in a.d. 1732 and at
Qazan in a.d. 1735. 8 The University of Moscow was opened in a.d.
1755 ; 8 and a commission for the promotion of elementary education was
appointed in a.d. 1778, with a Hungarian Serb savant , Yankovid, as its
moving spirit. 9

This progressive widening of the range of a new-fangled Western
system of education at home was accompanied in Peter’s Russia, as in
Mchmcd ‘All’s Egypt, by an effort to improve this exotic education’s
quality through sending an Hite of the students to school in the West. 10

« During ‘the Great Embassy* of a.d. 1697-98, ‘at least 750 men were recruited for
service in Russia. Most of them were Dutchmen, but there were also a good number of
Italians, Slavs, and Greeks from the Adriatic lands, skilled in the building and handling
of galleys’ (Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (London 1950,
English Universities Press), p. 35; cp. p. 89). A smsll team of English master-
shipwrights were given specially favourable treatment (ibid., p. 00). A Norwegian sea-
cuptain named Cruys, who was persuaded in A.D. 1698 to transfer from the Dutch to
the Russian service, rose to be an admiral in the Russian Baltic fleet (ibid., p. 36). The
employment of Westerners (other than those who became Russian subjects as a result
of the conquest of the Baltic provinces in a.d. «7«o) was, however, mostly confined to
the technical field. Not only the higher posts in the fighting sendees, but also those in
business and industry, were normally resented for Russian subjects, and ‘no instance is
known of any establishment started in Peter’s reign from imported capital’ (ibid., pp.
167-8).

J For Mchmcd 'Ali’s policy on this point, sec p. 603, n. 1, below.

* See Mcttig, op. cit., p. 78; Sumner, op. cit., pp. 35 and 152.

* See Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (London 1950,
English Universities Press), p. 153; Mettig, op. cit., p. 412,followed in III. iii. 282, n. 2.

» See Mettig, op. cit., p. 412.

<> a.d. 1730 was the date according to Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emer¬
gence of Russia (London 1950, English Universities Press), p. 153; a.d. 1759 according
to Mettig, op. cit., p. 83.

' See Mettig, op. cit., p. 82. 8 See ibid., p. 84.

« See ibid., pp. 96-97.

In Muscovy, as in the Ottoman Empire, this was a revolutionary departure from
traditional practice. In general the only missions on which Muscovite subjects had been
allowed to go abroad before Peter’s reign had been embassies, pilgrimages, and theo¬
logical studies in Eastern Orthodox Christian foreign countries. When Peter’s early
seventeenth-century predecessor Boris Godunov ( imperabat a.d. 1598-1605) had tried
to break with this tradition by sending five students to LObeck, six to France, and four to
England, only one of these fifteen doves had returned to the Muscovite ark. Of the four

556 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
Fifty young Russian noblemen were sent to the West for technical
instruction a few months ahead of Peter’s own departure on his grand
tour as a technological apprentice in a.d. 1697; 1 and more than a hun¬
dred Russian students were expatriated in that year. 1 Students of the
languages of the Islamic World were sent to Persia in a.d. 1716; and the
first Russian naval students to go to Western countries were a batch
sent abroad in a.d. 1719. 3 These early Petrine Russian students abroad
were unwilling pupils ; 4 but their recalcitrance was countered by exact¬
ing instructions and by the prospect of seeing their estates confiscated
by the Tsar if they did not bring home satisfactory evidence that they
had performed the tasks laid upon them. 5 Peter maintained a strict
control over these student-conscripts during their period of foreign
service, 6 and in Holland he appointed a resident inspector to look after
them. 7 On the other hand he rewarded Russian technological students
who had made a success of their tour of study abroad by providing them,
on their return to Russia, with capital to enable them to set up for them¬
selves in business. 8 These eighteenth-century Russian students in
Western countries, like their nineteenth-century Egyptian counterparts,
came under the general influence of the contemporary Western culture
in the process of acquiring their Western technological training. 9 The
learning of Western languages, for example, initiated them into a new
world of Western manners, morals, and letters; 10 and Peter himself
took a broad enough view of his utilitarian purpose to include the
Western arts of painting and architecture among the subjects that his
Russian students were sent to study abroad at first hand. 11

In the educational, as in the technological, field, Peter's utilitarian
bent' 2 never relaxed.

‘To the end of his life Peter looked on education as a training for some
specific form of state service: if men went abroad to learn economics, it
was for the sake of his new tariff; if they were trained in languages, it was

sent to England, one became a clergyman of the English Episcopalian Protestant Church,
another became an official of the English Government in Ireland, and a third became
an East India merchant. In the reign of Peter’s precursor the first Romanov Tsar,
Michael ( imperabat a.d. 1613-45), there had been a strong reaction in Muscovy towards
the traditional anti-Western attitude. When Prince Khvorostinin had expressed a pre¬
ference for Western culture, he had been compelled to recant; the Polish-educated son
of Prince Ordin-Nashchokin had fled to the West from the intolerably anti-Western
atmosphere of the Holy Russia of his day, and an official ban had been placed on foreign
travel, in the manner of contemporary Japan (see Brackner, A.: Peter der Grout (Berlin
iS 79 , Grotc), pp. 169-72).

! See Bnlckner, A.: Peter der Groue (Berlin 1879, Grotc), p. 174.

1 See ibid., p. x 75; Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence 0} Russia (Lon¬
don 1950. English Universities Press), pp. 34-41.

3 See BrOckncr, op. cit., p. 183.

* See Bruckner, op. cit., p. 176. Bnlckner cites a diary (preserved in manuscript at
QSzan) which had been kept by one of them—a member of the Tolstoy family, who was
fifty-two years old at the time of his compulsory expatriation as a student of Western
technology (ibid., p. 177). The spectacle of the Western World seen at first hand struck
Tolstoy with amazement (ibid., p. 192).

* See Bnlckner, op. cit., p. 175, followed in III. iii. 282, n. 2.

6 Sec Bnlckner, op. cit., p. 182.

* Sec ibid., p. 184.

9 bee ibid., p. 174.

10 See ibid., p. 189.

" Sec Mettig, op. cit., p. 125.

11 See pp. 674-5, below.

7 See ibid., p. 181.

‘ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 557

in order to act as translators or to serve as diplomatists. . . . Just as in
Russia the foreigners played mainly a rather narrow technical, training
r 61 e, x so .. . the Russians whom Peter sent to the West were assigned al¬
most exclusively to technical training.’ 1

This invincible narrowness of Peter’s own educational outlook would
have prevented the achievement even of Peter’s utilitarian educational
purposes if the operation of our ‘law’ that 'one thing leads to another’
had not run away with Peter’s educational policy after his death.

‘In his own lifetime . . . going to school in the West. . . neither led to
the results he desired nor had much immediate effect upon Russian cul¬
ture. His own intensely practical bent and his coarse heavy-handedness
caused him to treat his subjects far too much like inanimate objects upon
which could be rapidly imposed a new impress or novel tasks . . . [Yet]
this . . . aspect of his Westernisation . . . was perhaps in its ultimate in¬
fluence the most far-reaching of his innovations . . . [for,] within the next
two generations . . . , very different results began to flow from Peter’s
peremptory insistence on training abroad. Among many of the upper
class a taste for foreign travel rapidly developed, once it was no longer
obligatory and no longer to be spent in antipathetic apprenticeship to
navigation or gunnery. From such travel, and from Peter’s opening of the
door to foreign books and foreign ideas, modem Russian literature and
culture were born.’ 1

The vigour with which an exotic Western culture was introduced
through these primarily utilitarian educational channels by Peter the
Great into Muscovy and by Mehmed ‘All into Egypt makes the parallel
measures in Mahmud IPs Turkey seem feeble and desultory by com¬
parison; yet here too wc can observe the same progressive expansion
of a new-fangled educational system alia Franca from a narrowly
naval and military nucleus. 4 Mahmud II’s unsuccessful forerunner
Selim III (imperabat A.D. 1789-1807) had given a new impetus to a
military engineering school founded by ‘Abd-al-Hamld I (imperabat
a.d. 1773-89) by reorganizing it under French and British manage¬
ment. 5 Selim had also opened a school of navigation ; 6 and one of the
professors at Mahmud IPs military engineering school, who was the son
of a khoja of Jewish origin, became a pioneer translator of Western
technological works into Turkish. 7 Though an Imperial Military School

« See p. 551, n. 1, above.—A.J.T.

1 Sumner, op. cit., pp. 152 and 205. * Ibid., p. 205.

4 Sec Davison, R. H.: Reform in the Ottoman Empire, iSs6-iSy6 (thesis submitted
to Harvard University for the degree of Ph.D., rst April, 1942), p. 98. died here, by
permission of the author, while in process of revision for possible publication.

s Sec Kramers, J. H., s.v. 'Selim III’, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. iv (London
1934, Luzac). p. 220. 'The Westcrnioing movement did not spring fully armed from the
head of Selim III. Mahmud I (imperabat a.d. i 73 °- 54 ) employed the Comte de
Bonncval to reorganise the Corps of Bombardiers on Western lines. Under Mustafa III
(imperabat a.d. 1757-73) Baron de Tott did the same for the Artillery and taught at
the newly established School of Naval Engineering. Nor should Halil Hamid Pasha in
the next reign be forgotten: he opened a School of Military Engineering and strove
vigorously to modernise the Army until 'Abd-al-Hamid I (imperabat a.d, 1773-89)
began to suspect him of preparing a coup d'etat' —G. L. Lewis in The Listener, 4th
December 1952, p. 034.

6 Sec Kramers, ibid.

i See Davison, op. cit., p. 99 -

558 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

was founded in Turkey in a.d. 1830,’ it was said 2 that the only manual of
instruction possessed by Mahmud II’s new-model Turkish army as late
as circa a.d. 1835 was an elementary handbook with the title L'ficole du
Soldat which had been bought by Khosrev Pasha from a French corporal
named Gaillard; but a polytechnic for officers under the management of
three French instructors was opened circa a.d. 1846; 3 and this step was
followed up by the opening of an agricultural school in a.d. 1848 4 and
a veterinary school in a.d. 1850. 4 The opening, in the same year 1850, of
a school for training civil servants in the mosque of the Validch Sult 3 n
in Istanbul followed up Mahmud II’s foundation of schools for the
same purpose in the mosques of Sultan Ahmed and Sultan SuleymSn. 4
A scheme for secular primary education in Turkey was approved on
paper in a.d. 1846, but the first effective steps in this direction were not
taken till some twenty years later, 5 and then only at French instigation.

In the history of the Westernization of the Ottoman and Russian
worlds the waves of Western cultural influence that were sent coursing
through the veins of the Westernizing society’s body social by an
Herodian-minded autocrat’s initial measures for the limited purpose of
providing himself with an officers’ corps trained in the contemporary
Western art of war were reinforced by waves of comparable potency
arising from parallel measures, likewise inspired by the example of
contemporary Western practice, for looking after the health of the
troops and crews of standing armies and navies modelled on a Western
pattern.

In Russia the organization of public hygiene, which Peter had first
approached from a naval and military standpoint, 6 had progressed far
beyond its narrow original limits by the end of Peter’s reign. An Imperial
Medical Chancery was established in Russia in a.d. 1725 ; 7 precautionary
measures were taken against the plague; 7 and, when this scourge
attacked Moscow in a.d. 1773, the public health service demonstrated
its efficiency. 8 In a.d. 1764 the Empress Catherine II set a personal
example in the field of preventive medicine by submitting to vaccina¬
tion. 9

In Egypt, Mehmed ‘All’s approach to the exotic Western institution
of public hygiene was the same as Peter’s in Russia. His motives in
introducing Western medicine into his dominions were a concern for
the health of his new-model army 10 and a terror of the plague." He was

« See Engelhardt, E.: La Turquie el le Tanzimat (Paris 1882-4, Cotillon & Pichon
[successeur], 2 vols.), vol. ii, p. 8, n. x.

1 See Rosen, G.: Gesehichte der TGrhei von dem Siege der Reform im Jahrt 1826 bit
sum Pariier Traetal vomjahre 1856 (Leipzig 1856, HirzeJ, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 232.

> See Engelhardt, op. tit., vol. i, p. 82.

* See Engelhardt, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 8, n. x.

5 See Engelhardt, op. tit., vol. ii, p. 296.

6 Sec Mcttig, op. tit., p. 266. The first hospital in Russia was a military one founded
by Peter the Great (sec Sumner, op. tit., p. 206).

7 See Mettig. op. cit., p. 266. * See op. cit., p. 92.

0 See op. cit., p. 94. The officiant on this occasion was an English doctor. Russian doc¬
tors did not rise to taking equal rank with foreigners till after the beginning of the nine¬
teenth century (ibid., p. 9t), and Russians were originally debarred altogether from
practising as apothecaries (p. 90).

10 See Clot, op. tit., vol. ii, p. 369.

11 As early in his reign as a.d. 18x2—thirteen years before the arrival of the French

•ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 559

fortunate in being served by a French medical officer, Dr. A. B. Clot,
who was not only competent but was also imaginative, public spirited,
and courageous. In the course of his fifteen years’ service in Egypt, Clot
succeeded in propagating his new-fangled and unwelcome organization
of public hygiene alia Franca from its first narrow lodgement in Suley¬
man Pasha’s cantonments into the remotest corners of native Egyptian
civil life.

With five years' study of medicine in his native France behind him, 1
Clot arrived in Egypt in a.d. 1825 2 to organize a medical service for the
Egyptian Army, and managed to secure the adoption of the French
Army’s health regulations and the establishment of a conseil de santi on
the same French military pattern. 2 He showed his imagination in
arranging that the officers of his medical corps should wear exactly the
same uniforms as the combatant officers of corresponding rank, 1 and
his courage in insisting that Christian members of the corps should be
given the same status as their Muslim colleagues; 4 but the great achieve¬
ment in his career was his victory in a struggle to break out of the narrow
confines of the barrack square into the vast virgin field of native Egyptian
civil life.

Against a violent opposition—inspired by a general spirit of Islamic
conservatism and a particular Islamic prejudice against the practical
study of anatomy by the experimental method of dissection—Clot
succeeded in persuading Mehmed ‘Ali to found a medical school. 5 The
school was opened in a.d. 1827 6 with a hundred Egyptian pupils, who
were maintained and paid by the Government, and with seven Western
professors of divers nationalities. 7 A midwives’ school, a maternity
hospital, a pharmaceutical school, a preparatory school, and a school for
learning French 8 were attached to the medical school itself, 5 and the
two last-mentioned subsidiary institutions for providing Egyptian medical
students with a general education on Western lines were manifestly
indispensable adjuncts to the undertaking, since, to begin with, the
teaching had to be given through interpreters. 10 Twelve of the original
batch of pupils were sent on to Paris, where they were examined (in
French) by the Academy of Medicine and were given the degree of
doctor of medicine by the medical faculty of the university." The popular

physician Clot in Egypt to organize a public health service for him—Mehmed ‘All set
up a quarantine control at the port of Alexandria, on the advice of resident Western
physicians in private practice there, after receipt of the news that the plague had broken
out in Constantinople (Jabartl, op. cit., vol. viii, p. 341). Early in a.d. 1813 the Pasha,
without lifting his outlandish Quarantine, reinforced it by the more familiar traditional
Islamic preventive measure of giving orders for the liturgical reading aloud of Al-
Bukhari’s theological works in the Mosque of Al-Azhar; but after three days the 'ulami
broke off the recitation out of laziness (ibid., vol. ix, p. 9 )- The Grand Qadi of Egypt
declared his official approval of the quarantine (ibid., p. 19), but the troops paid no
attention to it (ibid., p. 22).

« Sec Clot, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 373. 1 Sec ibid., p. 370.

1 See ibid., p. 375. * See ibid., p. 376.

» See ibid., pp. 383-4. 6 Sec ibid., p. 384.

7 French, Italian, Spanish, German (ibid., p. 391). These Frankish professors were
required, as part of their duties, to attend at the hospitals (Bowring, op. cit., pp. I 34 ~S)-

* The French professors in this school taught mathematics, history, ar.d geography,
as well as their mother tongue (Bowring, op. cit., p. 134).

9 See Clot, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 385-7.

Sec ibid., p. 384.

«» See ibid., p. 388.

560 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
prejudice against dissection was successfully overcome; 1 but the military
discipline, to which Clot's medical students were subject, had to be
rigorously enforced; 2 and, like his colleague and compatriot the French
soldier Sfcve (alias Suleyman Pasha), this intrepid French medical
officer risked his life in doing his duty. 1

Clot had his reward when his medical school was transferred from its
original site at Abu Za'bal to the Qasr-al-'Ayn Palace in Cairo, 4 and
when he was allowed to turn the former military hospital on the
EzbekTyeh Square in Cairo into a civilian hospital in the Western style 5
and to transfer to it the patients languishing in an old-fashioned
marastan that had been founded by the Mamluk Sultan QalS’un
(dominabatur a.d. 1279-90). 6 By the year a.d. 1840 (the date of publica¬
tion of Clot’s book) the EzbekTyeh civilian hospital had seven hundred
beds (divided in equal numbers between the men's and the women's
wards), with additional provision for maternity cases and for lunatics,
while there were now eighteen hundred beds in the Cairo military
hospital, which had been transferred to Qasr-al-'Ayn. 7 Side by side
with these medical establishments in and around Cairo, Alexandria had
been equipped by the same date with an intendance de santi, a naval
hospital containing 1,200-1,500 beds, and a military hospital containing
500-600 beds. 8 Clot’s original maternity hospital, which remained at
Abu Za'bal, had a French directress, recruited from the maternity
hospital of Paris, and a staff of Sudanese and Abyssinian midwives. 0
Madame Gault taught her apprentices the French language as well as
the Western midwife’s art, and the negro women, as well as the Amharas,
proved to be intelligent. 10 A new maternity hospital, with a school of
midwifery attached to it, was afterwards opened in Cairo.”

One of the most valuable fruits of Clot Bey’s labours was the transla¬
tion into Arabic, and publication in Egypt, of Western medical works ; ,z
and this indefatigable propagator of Western culture in Dar-al-Isl 5 m
through a medical channel had full justification for claiming that

‘L’£cole de m^decine a iti d£jk ct sera toujours un foyer dc lumiires
rayonnant sur toute la population.’ 15

A traditional Islamic fanaticism and superstition had been successfully
eradicated from the souls of Clot Bey’s medical students; 14 and by a.d.

* See Clot, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 38s. 1 See ibid., pp. 38s and 380.

i One of Clot Bey’s pupils attempted to assassinate him (ibid., pp. 388-9). The
attempt made on Sive’a life by the recruits whom he was training has been recorded on
p. 242, n. 2, above. * See ibid., p. 392.

» See ibid., p. 396. * See ibid., p. 393, n. 2.

7 See Clot., op. cit., vol. i, p. 282. * See ibid., p. 269.

9 See Clot, op. cit.. vol. ii, p. 393. A pagan Sudanese or a Monophysite Christian
Abyssinian would be free from the prejudice that inhibited a Muslim Egyptian woman
of that generation from qualifying for a profession which was likewise still without
honour in contemporary Western eyes that had less excuse for looking down upon it,
considering that by this time they were already aware of its practical utility.

1° See ibid., pp. 393 and 394, n. 2. 51 See ibid., p. 394, n. 2.

11 See ibid., p. 397. is Ibid., pp. 397-8.

. 14 This claim of Clot’s that Western medicine was breaking down religious barriers
in Egypt was endorsed by Bowring in op. tit., p. 141. The introduction, into a traditional
Islamic social milieu, of Western medicine for the benefit of human being3 probably
had to contend with a more stubborn opposition than the contemporaneous intro¬
duction of the Western veterinary art, since, in a department of medicine in which the

‘ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 56:
1840 it was already possible for this benevolent Western Lucifer to
observe that

‘Ces progr&s intellectuels port^s dans les families y fructifient peu a peu,
et de Ik sc rdpandent parmi leurs compatriotes.’*

Clot Bey’s claim that the Western art of medicine had proved in
Egypt to be a particularly potent vehicle for the radiation of the Western
culture is borne out by a piquant illustration preserved in the dossier of
an official British observer who was visiting Egypt about the time when
Clot was sending his book to the press. In his report submitted to Lord
Palmerston on the 27th March, 1839, Sir John Bowring mentions that

‘There is a hospital at Alexandria, for the special use of the Navy—
though sometimes a few persons are admitted, on an order of the governor,
who are not employed in the public service, and a department of the hos¬
pital has lately been applied to the reception of pregnant women, whose
acceptance of the aid of Frank medical men is one of the most remarkable
evidences of the growth of a more tolerant and enlightened spirit.’ 2

The presence of a lying-in ward within the precincts of a naval
hospital seems as incongruous to Western minds imprisoned in their
own preconceived order of ideas as the initiation of a liberal political
revolution by subaltern military officers; yet in this case, as in that, a
combination of circumstances that would have been bizarre on native
Western ground turns out to have been natural and normal in a non-
Western social milieu that was in process of being penetrated by Western
cultural influences. The master-link in a chain of social cause and effect
leading inevitably to a result that is surprising only at first sight is duly
pointed out in a report on the medical schools in Mehmed ‘All's Egypt,
from the pen of Clot Bey himself, which is incorporated in Bowring’s
general report to Palmerston.

‘In commencing the great work of reformations that he determined
upon, Mahomet Ali made offers to European officers of every rank and
department; a general military organisation was introduced; and then, as
a matter of course, a medical service was created for the preservation of the
Egyptian forces.’ 2

The key here provided by Clot makes it easy for us to solve the riddle
that is presented at first sight by the presence of a lying-in ward in a naval

beneficiaries were animals, the Islamic prejudice against the dissection of human bodies
did not arise, while on the other hand Muslim minds were predisposed in its favour
by a humane Islamic tradition (which put contemporary Western practice to shame) of
showing mercy to non-human living creatures. Veterinary surgeons were introduced

S Mehmed 'Ali into Egypt from the West in a.d. 1827, and a veterinary school, origin-
y located at Rosetta, was afterwards transferred to Abu Za'bal, where it was placed

quality of the Pasha’s stud. The course of study
years; and here, as in the medical school, one of the fruits of Westernization was the
translation into Arabic, and publication in Egypt, of the principal Western scientific
works on the subject (Clot, op. cit., voL ii, pp. 407-14).

1 Ibid., pp. 397-8.

1 Bowring, Report on Egypt and Candia (London 1S40, Clowes & Clowes), pp.
55-56. Cp. p. 141, n. •.

J Clot Bey in Bowring, op. cit., p. 139. This passage from Clot’s pen is reproduced
in paraphrase by Bowring in his own report on p. 138.

562 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
hospital at Alexandria in a.d. 1839. In an earlier chapter of this Part, 1 we
have already noticed that Mchmed ‘Ali had been quick to learn, from
his experience in the Napoleonic Wars, the lesson that, in the contem¬
porary play of Western power politics, sea power was a supremely
potent instrument of policy. Upon his acquisition of the Pashalyq of
Egypt, he had promptly translated observation into action by equipping
himself with a navy of the contemporary Western pattern; and, after
losing the best part of his newly acquired fleet at Navarino in a.d. 1827,
he had turned a disaster to good account by setting himself to re-create
his navy on a sounder basis than before. At this second essay, he had no
longer been content just to buy up ready-made Western warships and
to hire ready-trained Western naval officers. He had decided to establish
at Alexandria a naval arsenal in which warships designed on Western
lines by Egyptian naval architects and built by Egyptian artificers were
to be commanded and navigated by Egyptian naval officers and manned
by Egyptian crews. This was Mchmed ‘All’s ultimate objective when
he founded his arsenal at Alexandria in a.d. 1829; but so ambitious a goal
as this was manifestly impossible to attain at one bound. The new
Egyptian naval arsenal could not become a going concern without
receiving at least a first impetus from the hands of imported Western
naval officers, naval architects, and shipwrights. Accordingly, negotia¬
tions were opened for enlisting the services of a fresh batch of Western
naval experts. But these Western technicians who were still indispensable
agents for the execution of Mchmed ‘All’s purpose in this field were
unwilling to accept the Pasha’s invitation to take up employment in
Egypt, even on attractive financial terms, unless they could bring their
families with them; and they were unwilling to expose their wives and
children to the plagues of Egypt without being assured of having
Western physicians on the spot to look after their health.

No doctors, no arsenal! The instalment of a Western medical staff was
a condition sine qiia non if the Pasha was to be successful in enticing the
indispensable Western naval experts to accept his offers. A proper
complement of Western physicians therefore accompanied the imported
Western technicians and their families, gave adequate attention to their
Frankish clientele’s health, and found themselves with energy still to
spare and time still on their hands. Like the Franks that they were,
these under-employed physicians were not content, as a contemporary
‘Osmanli might have been, to accept this golden opportunity of indulg¬
ing in keyf alia Turca. The restlessness which was the curse or blessing
of the Frankish ethos impelled them to keep themselves busy on some¬
thing ; and the obvious next ‘other business’ on their agenda, when they
had done all that they could for a handful of Frankish residents, w'as to
try to meet the most urgent medical needs of the native population. In
any mammalian society the most constant demand for medical aid is
that presented by maternity cases; and thus the idea of opening a lying-
in ward in their naval hospital, so far from being far-fetched, was the all
but inevitable first step in the quite inevitable enlargement of the range
of these imported Frankish physicians’ practice.

1 On p. 244, n. 1, above.

'ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER* 563
How one thing led to another in the thoughts and actions of these
Western medical practitioners in partibus Agarenorum has now been
explained; but it is none the less amazing that, through the unforeseen
and unsolicited agency of Franks imported into Egypt to tend their own
kind, a Macedonian Turkish Pasha’s determination to provide himself
with a navy on the Western model should have revolutionized the social
life of the native population of the country by breaking down one of the
strongest of all traditional Islamic tabus. Within the living memory of
the Muslims and the Franks of Mehmcd ‘All’s and Clot’s generation,
the best-beloved of the wives of a theoretically autocratic Ottoman
Padishah had been debarred by an inexorable Islamic sense of propriety
from receiving, even if she were sick unto death, any more intimate
ministrations from an infidel Western physician than the reading of the
pulse on the wrist of a timidly exposed hand, 1 while the rest of the
patient’s sorely ailing body was condemned to remain decently invisible
and unsuccourcd behind the bed-curtains. The selfsame Frankish
doctor, practising in Dar-al-Islam, might have had, within the normal
span of a professional career, both of the two bewilderingly irreconcilable
experiences of being thus constrained to fumble in the dark and of being
invited to assist an accouchement with the sovereign scientific disregard
for a traditional prudery that he would have been expected to show in
ministering to one of his own Frankish countrywomen. And this revolu¬
tion in Egyptian Muslim behaviour in one of the most intimate of all
medical affairs had taken place within the brief Time-span of, at the
longest, slightly less than forty-one years, reckoning back from the date
of Bowring’s submission of his report to the date of Napoleon’s landing
in Egypt, 2 or a mere fifteen years if wc take Dr. Clot’s instead of General
Buonaparte’s arrival in Egypt as our terminus post quem.

1 See Penzer, N. M.: The Har/m (London 1936, Harrap), p. 133.

* The traditional Islamic habit of keening middle-class and upper-class urban
women in seclusion had been battered by French blows from outside before a spon¬
taneous impulse to take advantage of proffered Frankish medical facilities made it begin
to crumble from within. A lively fear of the plague, and a proportionately strong deter¬
mination to take preventive measures of public hygiene, had moved the French Army
which had occupied Egypt in a.d. 1798 to violate the sanctity of a haram which had
previously been the Muslim householder’s castle (see Jabarti, Shaykh 'Abd-ar-Rahmfln
al-: ‘Ajd ib-al-Athdr fi’l-Tardjim toa'l Akhbdr (French translation: Paris 1888-96,
Leroux, 9 vols.), vol. vi, p. 276). The houses of Muslim families in Cairo were forcibly
entered and disinfected by the French in systematic domiciliary visits (ibid., p. 155),
and the Chief Medical Officer of the French forces distributed a tract on smallpox to the
members of the diwfln (ibid., p. 268). This body was an advisory council of native Egyp¬
tian notables, originally nominated by Napoleon himself, which had been instituted to
serve as a link between the French occupying authorities and the Egyptian people. The
diwan had at first been composed of mayors, merchants, and 'ulamfi in equal numbers
(see Correspondance, Bulletins, et Ordret du Jour de NafxUon, vol. iv: Exp/dition d'Egypte
(Paris, no date, M^ricaut), p. 198). It was afterwards reorganized to consist of 'ulamS
exclusively (Jabarti, op. cit., vol. vi, p. 259).

The insurrection in Cairo against an alien military regime provoked the French into
going farther. When, in the course of suppressing this revolt, they took the suburb of
BQlaq by storm, the French soldiers seized Egyptian Muslim women and taught them to
adopt the Western dress and manners of the day. The sequel confirmed the truth of a
dictum of the Attic poet Menander that is quoted by Saint Paul in his First Epistle to
the Corinthians, chap, xv, verse 33: 'Evil communications corrupt good manners.’
Egyptian Muslim women who had not been abducted by force majeure began to be
corrupted by the gallantry of the French soldiers and by the manners of the French
women who had accompanied the French expeditionary force (Jabarti, op. cit., vol. vi,
p. 305). Many Muslim women were voluntarily given by their fathers or other legal

564 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

This illustration shows that, when once an assaulted society’s outer
defences have been penetrated by an aggressively radioactive alien
culture’s raj's, our law that ‘one thing leads to another’ may operate at
almost break-neck speed.

(£) RESPONSES OF THE SOUL
x. Dehumanization

In turning our attention from the social to the psychological conse¬
quences of encounters between contemporaries, we shall still find it
convenient to give separate consideration to the respective effects on the
parties playing the antithetical roles of ‘agent’ and ‘reagent’; and here
again it will be best to examine the effect on the ‘agent’ first, since the
terms of the psychological relation between our two dramatis personae
are set by the party that has been the first to seize the initiative and that
has thereby gained an initial ascendancy over his fellow performer.

The representatives of an aggressively radioactive civilization that has
been successful in penetrating an alien body social are prone to succumb
to the hybris of the Pharisee who thanks God that he is not as other
men are. 1 Indeed, a dominant minority is apt to look down on the recruits
conscripted into its internal proletariat from a subjugated alien body
social as infra-human ‘under-dogs’. The nemesis attending this particular
vein of hybris is peculiarly ironical. In treating as an ‘under-dog’ the
fellow human creature who happens to be momentarily at his mercy, the
implicitly self-designated ‘top-dog’ is unconsciously reaffirming a truth
to which he is intending to give the lie. The truth is that all souls are
equal in the sight of their Creator; and the only result achieved by a
human being who seeks to rob his fellows of their humanity is to divest
himself of his own. A human being’s title to say homo sum is contingent,
as Chremes knew, upon his also saying and feeling ‘humani nihil a me
alienum puto’; 1 and ‘inhumanity’ is a double-edged word for describing
behaviour that has a twofold effect. It is impossible for a human being
to commit the sin of denying the humanity of other human souls without
incurring, in the act, the penalty of dehumanizing himself. This is the
besetting sin of the party that happens to be in the ascendant in an
encounter between contemporaries in which the assaulted body social
has been successfully penetrated by the aggressor society’s attack. All
manifestations of inhumanity are not, however, equally heinous. In this
descensus ad inferos there are different degrees.

The least inhuman form of inhumanity is apt to be displayed by

C rdians to French soldiers in lawful wedlock, in return for a nominal conversion to
mon the French bridegroom’s part; and these Muslim wives of Frankish husbands
leamt their husbands’ alien ways (ibid.). On the other hand, an 'ilim’s daughter suf¬
fered the death penalty, with her father's consent, at the hands of the French authorities
for having misconducted herself with French soldiers (Jabarti, op. cit., vol. vii, p. 44);
and other Muslim women likewise paid with their lives for having committed the same
offence (ibid., p. 45).. Other Muslim women, again, who had managed to commit this
misdemeanour with impunity, were afterwards married off by their families to un¬
suspecting soldiers of the Turkish army which took over the occupation of Egypt after
the French army s capitulation (ibid., p. si).

1 Luke xviii. 1 x.

2 Terence: Hautontimorumtnot, L 77 (Act I, scene i, 1. 25).

DEHUMANIZATION 565

representatives of a successfully aggressive civilization in whose culture-
pattern Religion is, and is felt and recognized to be, the governing and
orienting element. In a society which has not secularized its life by
breaking its way out of a religious chrysalis, the denial of ‘under-dog’s’
humanity will take the form of an assertion of his religious nullity.
A dominant Christendom will stigmatize him as an unbaptized heathen;
a dominant Islamic Society, as an uncircumciscd unbeliever. In thus
trusting in themselves that they are righteous, and despising others, 1
on account of a difference in ecclesiastical allegiance, these Christians
and Muslims are manifestly guilty of hybris; yet, in recognizing that
‘under-dog’, too, has a religion of a kind, albeit one that is erroneous and
perverse, ‘top-dog’ is implicitly admitting that ‘under-dog’ is, after all,
a human soul; and this means that the gulf fixed is not a permanently
impassable one when the distinction between sheep and goats has been
drawn in terms of religious practice and belief. A soul that has demon¬
strated its capacity for Religion by following even a religion that the
Pharisee rejects as false and bad has at any rate thereby proved itself
capable of conversion to the alternative religion that the Pharisee regards
as being exclusively true and good. The ugly line dividing the human
family into a superior and an inferior fraction could be obliterated
eventually through the progressive conversion of the whole of heathen¬
dom to the Pharisee’s persuasion; and, according to the tenets of most
of the higher religions, including those of the Buddhaic as well as the
Judaic school, this is not just a theoretical possibility; it is a practical
goal which the true believer must do his utmost to help the Church to
attain, in the pious expectation that these missionary labours will not
be in vain.

This potential universality of the Church was symbolized, in the
visual art of a Western Christendom in its Medieval Age, in the conven¬
tion by which one of the three Magi came to be portrayed as a Negro; 2
and, in the practice of an Early Modern Western Christendom which
had forced its presence upon all other living human societies by its feat
of mastering the art of oceanic navigation, the same sense of the Church’s
universality had shown its sincerity in action in the readiness of the
Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores to go to all lengths of social
intercourse, including intermarriage, with bona fide converts to a
Tridentine Roman Catholic Christianity, without any longer taking
account either of a transcended difference of religion or of an abiding
difference of language or race. 1 The Spanish conquerors of Peru and the
Philippines were so much more eagerly concerned to impart their
Christian religion than to propagate their Castilian language that they
endowed the native languages of the conquered peoples with the means
of resisting the spread of Castilian at their expense by developing these
languages into vehicles for literary expression in order to convey the
Catholic Western Christian liturgy and literature to populations that
spoke these languages as their mother tongues. 4

1 Luke xviii. 9. * See II. i. 224. » See II. i. 224.

* In V. v. 523-4 we have already noticed that the Incas’ policy of promoting the use
of the Quichua language as the lingua franca of an Andean universal state was taken over

5 66 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

The readiness of the Early Modern Roman Catholic Christian agents
in the diffusion of a Western culture to intermarry with their converts
was impressively attested in the twentieth century of the Christian Era
by the physical evidence of the mixture of blood in the contemporary
populations of all ci-devant or subsisting dominions of the Spanish and
Portuguese empires in which there had been an indigenous population of
any considerable density at the time of the original conquest. A racial
amalgam including cross-breeds of every degree from an all but pure
West European strain to an all but pure indigenous race of the pre-
Columbian or pre-da Gaman stock was at this date characteristic of the
populations of the successor-states of the former Spanish Empire of
the Indies, from Mexico to Bolivia and Paraguay inclusive; and it was
likewise characteristic of Brazil, Portuguese West and East Africa, Goa, x
and those coastal districts of Ceylon that had been annexed to an expand¬
ing Western Christendom by Portuguese conquerors before they had been
wrested out of Portuguese hands by the Dutch, and out of Dutch hands
by the British.

In thus demonstrating the sincerity of their religious convictions by
receiving into their society all alien converts to their faith, the Spanish
and Portuguese pioneers of an expanding Early Modern Christendom

and carried farther by the Catholic Christian hierarchy in the Spanish Viceroyalty of
Peru. The corresponding ecclesiastical policy of using native languages, in preference
to Castilian, as vehicles for the propagation of Christianity in the Philippine Islands is
noticed by Wyndham, H. A.: Problems oj Imperial Trusteeship: Native Education
(London 1933, Milford), pp. 103-4. In their single-minded determination to carry out
their religious mission of instructing the Filipinos in the Tridentinc Catholic Christian
Faith, the missionary orders in the Philippines persistently and successfully flouted
the Spanish Crown's order—originally given in a.d. 1550 by Charles V and reiterated
in 1636, 1770, 1772, 1774 . «md 1792—that the language of religious instruction for
Filipinos should be Castilian (Wyndham, loc. cit., following Blair, E. H., and Robertson,
J. A.: The Philippine Islands, 1493-1S93 (Cleveland, Ohio 1903-9, Clark, 55 vols.),
vol. xxix, p. 265; vol. xxxv, p. 310; vol. xxxvii, p. 104; vol. xxxviii, p. an; vol. xlv, pp.
184-6, 221, 222; vol. 1, p. 15).

• In a.d. 1952 it seemed probable that, of the three West European Powers between
whose empires the whole of Continental India had been partitioned five years back,
Portugal would be the last to lose her surviving Continental Indian possessions, in spite
of the fact that in this age Portugal was militarily and politically very much weaker than
either Great Britain or France. The ground for this expectation was that the decisive
factor determining the political future of Asiatic countries that had been under Western
rule was the will of their inhabitants. The British had been led to evacuate India in
A.D. 1947 by a recognition of, and respect for, a will to political independence among
their former Indian fellow subjects which had been steadily growing in intensity, and
had at the same time been captivating an ever larger proportion of the population of
British Indis, over a period of more than half a century. In a.d. 1952 it looked as if the
population of the enclaves of French-ruled territory in India would opt for a political
Cleichschaltung with the majority of their fellow Indians, who by that date had become
citizens of a fully self-governing and potentially independent Indian Union. Already
in a.d. 1949 the population of Chandemagore had voted for entry into the Indian
Union in virtue of an agreement, concluded between the Indian Union and France in
a.d. 1948, that plebiscites should be held in Pondicherry, Mah<, Chandernagorc,
Karikal, and Yanaon. The contemporary population of Portuguese India was hardly
distinguishable in race from the inhabitants of the rest of the sub-continent, since the
Portuguese blood that had been infused into the veins of the Goanese in the course of
some four and a half centuries was no more than a tincture. This tincture, however, was
significant, not in virtue of its physical strength, but because it was an outward visible
sign of an inward spiritual union which the Portuguese conquerors of Goa had con¬
summated with a conquered native Indian population that had embraced the conquerors’
religion. In A.D. 1952 it remained to be seen whether the community of religion that
was a voluntary bond between Goa and Portugal might not prove morally stronger than
the community of race and the geographical contiguity that would tend to attract the
tiny territory of Goa towards the mighty mass of an encompassing India.

DEHUMANIZATION 567

had been anticipated by the Muslims, who, from the outset, had inter¬
married with their converts, without regard to differences of race. The
Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors of the Sasanian Empire and Trans-
oxania were not deterred from mingling their blood with the blood of
their converted Persian and Turkish subjects by their consciousness of
the physical difference between these Northerners’ unattractive rud¬
diness 1 and the comely swarthiness of their own noble Arab breed; 2
and in a later age a ruddy-cheeked and auburn-haired Ottoman Turkish
Muslim empire-builder who had accentuated the peculiarities of his
pristine Turkish physique by intermarriage with Orthodox Christian
and Western Christian renegades of European provenance would
demonstrate his abiding loyalty to his adopted Islamic faith by also
intermarrying, not only with his unattractively swarthy Arabic-speaking
Muslim subjects, but even with the repulsively black-skinned and
frizzle-haired Sudanese, when once these uncouth barbarians had re¬
deemed their physical and cultural defects in the 'Osmanli’s eyes by
embracing the true faith of Islam. 1

The Islamic Society had also inherited, from a precept enshrined and
consecrated in texts of the Qur’an by the Prophet Muhammad himself,
a recognition that there were certain non-Islamic religions which, in
spite of their inadequacy by comparison with Islam, were authentic
partial revelations of divine truth and goodness. In the pre-Islamic
‘Days of Ignorance’, these broken lights 4 of God’s countenance 5 had
been, in Muhammad’s eyes, the brightest lights shining in an uncom¬
prehending darkness; 6 and, on this view, they would have continued to
be the best means yet vouchsafed by God to Man for his salvation if they
had not been superseded in the fullness of time by a complete and de¬
finitive revelation in the shape of Islam. The affinity with Islam that
was to be recognized in Judaism and Christianity as two morning stars
preceding and heralding an Islamic sunrise was acknowledged in the
Islamic ecclesiastical vocabulary by the bestowal of the name ‘People of
the Book’ ( Ahl-al-KitSb ) on communities possessing a Torah and a
Gospel which, in the Prophet Muhammad’s theophany, were divinely
revealed prefaces to the Qur’ 3 n; and this Islamic recognition of the
validity of the Jewish and Christian faiths up to the limits of their im¬
perfect spiritual illumination carried with it a political corollary. The
Islamic Shari'ah declared that, when once any non-Muslims who were
‘People of the Book’ had submitted to Muslim rule and had agreed to
pay a surtax to the Islamic state in token of their submission and in
return for a Muslim guarantee of their security, this transaction con¬
ferred on these dhimmis a right to be protected by the Muslim ‘ascen¬
dancy’ without being required to renounce their inherited non-Muslim
faith. 7

* The Arabs’ use of the term hamrd’ as a depreciatory epithet for their northerly
subjects is noticed by Al-Balidhuri in his Kitdb Futuh al-Bulddn (see the English
translation published by the Columbia University Press, vol. i (19x6) p. 441, and Part II

(* aa6. . * See ibid., pp. 226-7.

* Tennyson: In Memoriam, Invocation, stanza 5.

5 Job xxix. 24 and Psalm iv. 6. 4 Johni. 5.

^ See II. ii. 245; IV. iv. 225-6; V. v. 674-5; v * *° 4 - 5 -

568 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

A privilege which had perhaps been confined originally to the Jews
and Christians and Sabians was tacitly extended, in the event, to cover
not only the Zoroastrians 1 but also even the polytheistic and idolatrous
Hindus; so that in practice the Muslims came to recognize that the
adherents of all other higher religions had a moral claim to be tolerated
by the followers of Islam on the implicit ground that they too, in their
degree, had been recipients of revelation from the One True God. This
treatment de facto as ‘People of the Book’, which the Zoroastrians and
Hindus enjoyed in Dar-al-Islam, was accorded to the Jews in Christen¬
dom; 2 for, though the status was not recognized de jure in the canon law
of the Christian Church, it was no more possible for Christianity than
it was for Islam to cut the ground of its own moral claims to theological
validity from under its own feet by proscribing another higher religion
which was not only older than it was, but was its forerunner according to
its own contention. 3

The positive attitude, manifested in this Islamic concept of ‘People
of the Book’, towards another religion that can be recognized as being
spiritually akin to one’s own, has its antithesis in a negative attitude
manifested in the Christian concepts of ‘schismatics’ and ‘heretics’.
From this antithetical negative standpoint the spiritual affinity with the
Church that is displayed by a community which is nevertheless beyond
the Church’s pale is not a merit carrying a title to toleration; it is a per¬
versity calling for extirpation by physical force if persuasion cannot
wean these lost souls away from their provocative sin against the light.
An Islam which had succeeded in rising to a spiritually higher level in
its attitude towards non-Islamic ‘People of the Book’ descended to the
prevailing Christian level in its attitude towards enemies that were men
of its own house. 4 The feud within the bosom of Islam between a usually
dominant majority which eulogized its own version of the True Faith
by calling it ‘the Beaten Track (SunnaJi)’, while it denigrated its usually
down-trodden minoritarian opponents’ version by calling it ‘the Sect
(ShVah)', came to display all the rancour, violence, and cruelty that, in
a prc-Islamic Christendom, had been displayed in the successive feuds
between Catholics and Gnostics, Trinitarians and Arians, Christolatrists
and Ncstorians, Mclchites and Monophysites; and Christendom, for
its part, remained blind to the import of the disaster that had been the
penalty of a fratricidal civil war when a Christian house divided against
itself by the Melchite-Monophysite feud had fallen 5 at one blow from
a Muslim sword. If this lesson had been read and taken to heart by the
Christians of the seventh century of their era, Christians of subsequent
centuries might not have had the face to revive the Christian scandals of

* See the Qur'in, Surah xxii. 17, quoted in V. v. 674, n. 2.

1 See pj>. 272-313, above.

> The historical and theological relation of Christianity to Judaism explains why the
Christian Church never extended its tacit toleration of Judaism to an Islam which was
in one aspect a post-Christian reversion to Judaism from Christianity. In the Christian
view the tolerance morally due to a truly though imperfectly inspired pre-Christian
approximation towards Christianity could not properly be extended to a perverse back¬
sliding from the Christian summit of religious attainment.

4 Micah vii. 6; Matt. x. 21 and 35-36; Mark xiii. 12; and Luke xxi. t6.

5 Matt. xii. 25; Mark iii. 24-25; and Luke xi. 17.

DEHUMANIZATION 569

a pre-Islamic age of Christian history in the latter-day feuds between
Eastern Orthodox Christians and Western Catholics and between
Roman Catholics and Protestants within the fold of a Western Church
which, in contemporary Eastern Orthodox eyes, was uniformly schis¬
matic in its Protestant as well as in its Roman aberration.

Apart from this stiJT-necked refusal to admit that their professed
principles of toleration were applicable to their family quarrels, the
followers of higher religions of Judaic origin could not always bring
themselves to apply these principles in practice to the believers in other
Judaic faiths. The Western Christian barbarian conquerors of the
Iberian Peninsula gave the subjugated Jews, as well as the subjugated
Muslims, a choice in which the grim three proffered options of annihila¬
tion, expulsion, and conversion to Christianity were substituted for
Christendom’s traditional offer, to the Jews in her midst, of toleration
at the price of penalization;* and, when the progeny of the Jews who had
chosen to profess conversion in Spain in preference to exile, or who had
been constrained to profess conversion in Portugal as the only way left
open to them there of escaping death, came to prosper in the Christian
community which they had thus entered under duress, the envy of their
non-Semitic compatriots and co-religionists found vent in witch-hunts
whose victims forfeited their property and were put to death by the
fiendishly cruel torment of burning them alive if they were convicted of
having remained crypto-Jews or having secretly embraced some heretical
form of Christianity.

We have still to take note of the greatest intellectual and moral in¬
consistency of all in the conduct of ‘top-dog’ towards ‘under-dog’ when
‘top-dog’s’ denial of ‘under-dog’s’ humanity has taken the form of
asserting his religious nullity. The free passage from one ecclesiastical
allegiance to another, as a sequel to becoming convinced of the spiritual
superiority of the religion to which the spiritual pilgrim’s loyalty is being
transferred, had always been ‘a one-way street’ under the ecclesiastical
by-laws of the dominant religious party. In Islamic customary practice,
for example, a meritorious conversion that was rewarded with the
guerdon of a genuinely unreserved admission into the bosom of the
Islamic body social took on the polar aspect of an abominable apostasy
whose inexorable penalty was death if ever it was a question of a Muslim
seeing the light in some other religion, and following this new light that
he saw to the non-Islamic goal to which it led. Inconsistency, injustice,
and intolerance are the inevitable fruits of inhumanity in all its forms;
yet the relative innocuousness of inhumanity in the form of religious
discrimination becomes apparent when we observe the noxiousness of its
effects in the lower forms to which it is capable of descending.

The next least noxious form of ‘top-dog’s’ denial of ‘under-dog’s’
humanity is an assertion of ‘under-dog’s’ cultural nullity in a society
that has broken out of a traditional religious chrysalis and has translated

* See II. ii. 244. This threefold choice was the ultimatum presented to the Castilian
Jews in A.D. 1391 and A.D. 1492. The choice placed before the Portuguese Jews in a.d.
1497 was one between the two harsher alternatives only; they were not given the option
of going into exile (see II. ii. 247, n. 3.).

570 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
its values into secular terms. In the history of the cultural aggression
of the civilizations of the second generation, this was the connotation of
the distinction drawn by members of an Hellenic Society between
‘Hellenes’ and ‘Barbarians’, 1 and by members of a Sinic Society between
their cultivated selves and the miserable ‘E’ who still languished in
outer darkness on the fringes of a Sinic World which, in Sinic belief,
was the unique treasure-house of ‘Civilization’ with a capital ‘C’. In
a Late Modern Western World this cultural dichotomy of Mankind
into ‘civilized people’ and ‘barbarians’ had found exponents in the
French, who had half-consciously revived or half-spontaneously re¬
conceived this Hellenic concept in working out their relations with the
North American Indians in the eighteenth century, with the Maghribis
and Annamcsc in the nineteenth century, and with the Negro peoples
of the French African Empire south of the Sahara in the twentieth cen¬
tury of the Christian Era. In the same Late Modem Age of Western
history the same attitude had been adopted by the Dutch in their rela¬
tions with the Malay peoples of Indonesia. In the Cape Province of
South Africa, Cecil Rhodes had sought to kindle the same cultural
ideal in the hearts of his Dutch-speaking and English-speaking fellow

« In the Hellenic usage of this pair of antithetical terms the dichotomy of Mankind for
which the terms stood in the fifth century b.c. and in all subsequent ages of Hellenic
history except the last age of all was a distinction between people who led and people
who did not lead the Hellenic way of life as this was lived in whatever the age might be.
In this established classical usage of the terms the criterion by which a human being or
community was numbered either among the Hellenic sheep or among the barbarian
goats was cultural, not religious or linguistic.

The Aetolian, Epirot, Macedonian, and Paconian Greek-speaking barbarians in
Continental European Greece to the west of the Ozolian Locris and to the west and north
of Thessaly were not accepted as Hellenes in this prevailing cultural sense until the post-
Alexandrine Age, and it was not til! the penultimate phase of Hellenic history, in which
the Hellenic World was united politically in a universal state established by Latin¬
speaking empire-builders, that the most northerly of these barbarians with a Greek
mother tongue—the Agrianes and Dentheletae round the headwaters of the rivere
Strymon (Struma) and Oescus (Isker)—were brought within the fold of the Hellenic
culture by its latter-day non-Greek-speaking Roman propagators whose forebears had
graduated as masters of Hellenic arts in the generation of Titus Quinctius Flamininus
in the early years of the second century B.c. On the other hand there were non-Greek-
speaking peoples—first and foremost the Carians and the Lycians at the south-east
comer of the Aegean Basin—who had been Hellenes in the cultural sense since the
earliest date at which a distinctively Hellenic culture had been discernible. This non-
conterminousness of the area in which the Greek language was spoken and the area
in which the Hellenic way of life was lived has already been noticed in other contexts
(see III. iii. 478; V. v. 484; and pp. 412-14, above).

In origin, however, the term ‘barbaros’ was an onomatopoeic word signifying the
speaker of a language that sounded like gibberish to ears attuned to Greek, and it still
bears the linguistic meaning suggested by its etymology in the Homeric phrase Kaptt
Pap8ap6$ojioi (Iliad, Book II, 1 .867). The term ‘Hellin', again, originally denoted, not
a follower of the Greek way of life, but a citizen of some one of a number of political
communities that enioyed the privilege of membership in a local religious association
of the friends, neighbours, and patrons ('Amphictyones’I of a pair of shrines in the
central segment of European Greece: the temple of the Anthelan Artemis at Thermo¬
pylae and the temple of the Pythian Apollo at Delphi. It is noteworthy that, in the last
phase of Hellenic history, the antithesis between Hellene and Barbarian reacquired the
religious connotation that had been the word ‘Hellan’s’ original significance. The Greek-
writing Early Christian Fathers’ self-consciously defiant laudatory use of the word
‘barbarian’ to denote a Jewish and Christian religious revelation that was to supersede
the Hellenic philosophy proved to be too bizarre a tour de force to establish itself; but,
after the official conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, the term ‘Hellene’
eventually came to signify, in Christian Greek parlance, a crank whose notion of loyalty
to the Hellenic culture took the perversely religious form of clinging to some pre-
Christian form of Paganism.

DEHUMANIZATION 57 *

Whites when he had coined his slogan ‘Equal rights for every civilized
man south of the Zambesi’. 1

In South Africa this spark of idealism had been smothered, after the
establishment of the Union in a.d. 1910, by the eruption of a narrow-
hearted and violent-minded Afrikander Dutch Nationalism which, not
content with waging a fratricidal linguistic warfare against the English-
speaking members of a dominant minority of West European provenance,
was also bent on asserting its ascendancy over its South African
fellow countrymen of Bantu, Indonesian, and Indian origin in the name
of a superiority to which the Afrikander laid claim on the score neither
of his Early Modern Western culture nor of his Calvinist religion but of
his Nordic race. The French, on the other hand, had gone to impressive
lengths in giving political effect to their cultural convictions. 1

Even in the Maghrib—where, as in South Africa, public policy was
constrained to accommodate itself to the ambivalently hostile feelings
of a dominant minority of West European origin that was fearful of be¬
ing swamped by a native majority which it not only feared but also
despised—the acquisition of full French citizenship had been open since
a.d. 1865 to native Algerian subjects of the Islamic faith on condition of
their acquiescing in the jurisdiction of the French civil law which the
status of full French citizenship automatically imposed on its recipients.
It is true that the French ‘ascendancy’s’ insistence on the maintenance
of this condition ensured, as it was intended to ensure, that the number
of MaghribI French subjects applying for full French citizenship should

1 When challenged to define hi* phrase 'civilized man’ in the course of the debate on
the third reading of the Glen Grey Bill in the Cape of Good Hope House of Assembly,
Rhodes is reported to have responded by declaring on the 9th August, 1894,. that he
meant ‘a man, whether Black or White, who has sufficient education to write his name,
has some property, or works—in fact is not a loafer' (sec McDonald, J. G.: Rhodes,
A Life (London 1927, Philip Allen), p. 171). In his speech during the debate on the
second reading of the Glen Grey Bill, Rhodes is reported to have said: ‘We fail utterly
when we put natives on an equality with ourselves.... What we may expect after a hun¬
dred years of civilization, I do not know. If I may venture a comparison, I would com¬
pare the natives generally, with regard to European Civilization, to fellow-tribesmen of
the Druids, and just suppose that they were come to life after the two thousand years
which have elapsed since their existence. That is the position’ ('Vindex': Cecil Rhodes,
His Political Life and Speeches, 1SS1-1900 (London 1900, Chapman & Hall), p. 379).

Neither of these passages is to be found in the Cape of Good Hope 'Hansard' entitled
Debates in the House of Assembly in the First Session of the Ninth Parliament of the Cape
of Good Hope, 17th May to 18th August, 1894 (Cape Town 1894, 'Cape Times’ Printing
Works), in which the context of the words reported by ‘Vindex’ appears on p. 364,
col. 2, as part of Rhodes' speech of the 26th July [not the 30th July, which is the date
given by 'Vindex'] on the second reading, while the debate on the third reading is
reported there on pp. 464, col. 2, to 470, col. 1. But this non-appearance of Rhodes’
alleged words in 'Hansard' does not, of course, constitute a disproof of their authenticity.

In his speech in the House of Representatives on the 26th July, 1894, as reported in
‘Hansard’, Rhodes is represented as saying that 'he had based all his replies on the
understanding that, in so far as brains, the Natives were different’ (p. 369, col. x).
This apparent profession of a belief in the existence of insurmountable intellectual
differences correlated with physical differences seems to be in contradiction with a
reference (reported on a lower line of the same column) to 'this barbarian or this gentle¬
man who had just emerged from barbarism’ and with an earlier statement (reported
on p. 367, col. 1) that Rhodes 'thought they might first allow those children just emerged
from barbarism to manage their own local affairs’. In the adjourned debate on the second
reading of the Bill on the 2nd August, he is represented in 'Hansard’ (p. 418, col. 1)
as talking of ‘the second stage of the Natives—that was, when they were emerging from
pure barbarism, as compared with the third stage, when they were, apart from colour,
apparently the same as the Whites'. This last-quoted passage has a decidedly French or
Roman flavour. a See II. i. 223.

572 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
be negligibly small, since a submission lo the French civil law was
incompatible with the retention of an Islamic ‘personal statute’ which
few Maghrib! Muslims in that age were willing to renounce. The opposi¬
tion of the West European colonists in French North-West Africa proved
powerful enough, during the interval between the two world wars, to
prevent the passage through the parliament in Paris of legislation for
enabling an elite of culturally voluds Muslim native Algerian French
subjects to acquire full French citizenship without their any longer being
required to sacrifice their Islamic ‘personal statute’ 1 as the purchase price
of this political privilege; and it was not till the 7th March, 1944, that
the Algerian Muslims were granted exemption from having to fulfil this,
for them, all but prohibitive condition in virtue of an ordinance adopted
on that date by the French Committee of National Liberation. 2

This ordinance conferred full French citizenship, without forfeiture
of Islamic 'personal statute’, on Algerian Muslim French subjects falling
within certain specified categories, 3 and provided for their registration
on the same electoral lists as their non-Muslim fellow citizens, while
all other Algerian Muslim adult males were enrolled in electoral colleges
empowered to elect two-fifths of the members of the Algerian General
Assembly and departmental and municipal councils, except in those
municipalities in which the Muslims constituted less than two-fifths of
the local population—where proportionate reductions in their communal
representation were to be made. The ordinance of the 7th March, 1944,
also proclaimed the abolition of all discrimination between Muslims
and non-Muslims in Algeria; and the quota of Muslim scats on
Algerian public bodies was raised from 40 per cent, to 50 per cent,
by the terms of the French Constitution promulgated on the 27th
October, 1946, though this concession to Algerian Muslim French
subjects was offset by the simultaneous doubling of the numbers of
the non-Muslim French electors in Algeria as an automatic conse¬
quence of the enfranchisement of female non-Muslim (but not female
Muslim) French nationals. Thereafter, the Statute of Algeria, passed
by the Parliament in Paris on the 1st September, 1947, transformed the
former Financial Delegations in Algeria into a Financial Assembly in

* Sec Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey of International Affairs, 1937, voJ. i
(London 1938, Milford), pp. 496-7 and 5x1-27. This abortive French inter-war legisla¬
tion had a notable precedent in the Roman practice of allowing Jewish Roman subjects
to become Roman citizens without renouncing the observance of the Law of Moses. The
Jews of the Roman Empire were accorded this politic exceptional privilege by the Roman
Imperial Government because—like the Muslim, and unlike the Jewish, indigenous
French subjects in the Maghrib—the Jews, alone among the multifarious subjects of
Rome, had shown themselves unwilling to purchase the political treasure of citizenship
at the religious price of renouncing their hereditary ‘personal statute’ (Toynbee, op.
cit., vol. cit., p. 496, n. x, and d. 497, n. 5).

1 See Kirk, George: The Middle East in the War (London 1953, Cumberlege), Part
HI (Viii) (#), p. 422, in the Survey of International Affairs, 1939-1946.

» The members of these categories amounted to at least 60,000 persons in all, as
against the 7,817 Algerian Muslims who had possessed French citizenship in A.D. 1936.
There were, however, about 400,000 non-Muslim French citizens entitled to vote in
the national parliamentary elections in the three Algerian Departments of France (Kirk,
op. cit., p. 422) .while, according to the Algerian census of the 8th March, 1936. the
total number of French citizens of European origin in the three Algerian Departments
at that date had amounted to not more than 978,297 out of a total population, in these
three Departments, of 6,592,033 (Toynbee and Boulter, op. cit., p. 491, n. 1, and p.
493 )-

DEHUMANIZATION 573

which French citizens and French subjects were to be represented in
equal numbers; but the last word remained, as before, with the Governor-
General.

Meanwhile in Tropical Africa, where French public policy did not
have to contend with the pride and fear of European colonists, it had
been carried by this time to its logical conclusion in individual cases
which were as striking as they were rare.

The sincerity of the French in acting on their ideal of opening all
political and social doors in France and the French Empire to anyone
who had successfully graduated in the French version of a Late Modern
Western culture was demonstrated, within the present writer’s lifetime,
by an incident which, in vindicating the honour of France, had an
appreciable effect on the outcome of the World War of a . d . 1939-45.
In the phase of this war that followed the fall of France in June 1940, it
was a question of great moment whether Marshal Petain’s Government
at Vichy or the Free French Movement temporarily based on Great Britain
would succeed in rallying to its cause the strategically and economically
important French territories beyond the limits of a temporarily prostrate
European France. At this critical juncture the Governor of the Chad
Province of French Equatorial Africa was a French citizen of Negro
African race, Monsieur Fdlix Eboud; this Negro African Frenchman by
cultural adoption duly exercised the political responsibility attaching to
his post in the French public sendee by opting in favour of General de
Gaulle; and the moral effect of his lead on the hearts and minds of his
European French colleagues as well as his African French kith and kin
produced the momentous political result of giving the Free French
Movement its first foothold in the French Empire in Africa.

This French example shows that the cultural as well as the religious
criterion for drawing the inhuman distinction between ‘top-dog’ and
‘under-dog’ is a form of denying ‘under-dog’s’ humanity that does not
fix an impassable gulf between the two fractions into which it artificially
divides the human family. On the acid test of ‘top-dog’s’ reaction to the
question of intermarriage with his alleged inferiors on the other side of
his arbitrarily drawn dividing line, the response of French agnostics in
Africa and Dutch Protestants in Indonesia 1 was no less positive than
that of Portuguese Catholics at Goa and Creole Catholics in Mexico;
and, in both cases alike, this transcendence of a sexual tabu was proved
to be a genuine fruit of humane feeling, and not just a surrender to the
demon of physical incontinence, by the favourableness of the social
status accorded to the children born of these unions, including those
begotten out of lawful wedlock. At the same time, it is evident that this

1 The contrast between the relative liberalism of the Dutch in Indonesia and the
extreme inhumanity of their kinsmen in South Africa in their attitude towards ‘under¬
dog* is a striking example of the variability in the character of the local responses to a
challenge in diverse local circumstances. The same contrast was illustrated at the same
date by a similar difference in the attitudes of British temporary resident officials and
British would-be permanent settlers in Kenya; and wc have already observed that even
the French, Spanish, and Italian settlers in French North-West Africa were not saved
by the comparative humanity of their Catholic and Roman traditions from lapsing into
an Afrikander-like attitude towards the Muslim indigenous Algerian population upon
whose homeland this immigrant West European minority had intruded.

574 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

right of way across an inhuman gulf will not be guaranteed in such
explicit terms by a cultural as it will be by a religious passport.

The right to exchange one higher religion for another was ensured in
theory—however flagrantly this theory might be flouted in practice—in
virtue of the convention that a soul’s allegiance even to the church into
which it had been born had been contracted, not by the involuntary
physical experience of birth, but by a voluntary act of spiritual affiance.
A male child born of Muslim parents obtained its initiation into member¬
ship of the Islamic Church by undergoing the rite of circumcision at
puberty, while a daughter as well as a son of Christian parents obtained
her initiation into membership of the Christian Church by a rite of
baptism in which the voluntariness of the declarations and undertakings
by which this physical rite was accompanied was signified in the
appointment of godparents to speak on the infant’s behalf words imply¬
ing an exercise of free will that was not practicable for a human being
till she had arrived at the years of discretion. In contrast to this theory
that an ancestral religion is adopted by a personal act of free choice, it
is impossible even to pretend that the way of life in which a child is
educated is not inculcated as a habit before the pupil has had a chance of
saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to it; and a culture which has thus ex hypothesi been
imposed must be presumed to be less easy to change than a religion that
has ex hypothesi been chosen. On this showing, the patently involuntary
‘Barbarian’ was a less promising subject for conversion than the
reputedly deliberate ‘Unbeliever’. The decisive downward step, how¬
ever, in ‘top-dog’s’ descensus Averni is not the change from ‘Unbeliever’
to ‘Barbarian’, but the change from ‘Barbarian’ to ‘Native’, in the defini¬
tion of the stigma by means of which the oppressor seeks to rob his
victim of an inalienable humanity.

In stigmatizing the members of an alien society as ‘Natives’ of their
homes, ‘top-dog’ is denying their humanity by asserting their political
and economic nullity. While admitting the indisputable fact that he has
found them already in possession at the time of his own appearance on
the scene, he is making this admission without conceding that these
‘Natives” mere priority of occupation gives them any title, either legal
or moral, as against himself. By designating them as ‘Natives’ sans
phrase, he is implicitly assimilating them to the non-human fauna and
flora of a virgin 'New World’ that has been waiting for its predatory
and acquisitive latest human discoverers to enter in and take possession
in virtue of a right of ‘eminent domain’ over a ‘Promised Land’ deemed
to be in the gift of some war-goddess of Private Enterprise. On these
premises the fauna and flora of the wilderness may be regarded by the
human pioneer in one or other of two alternative lights. Either he may
treat them as vermin and weeds to be extirpated in order to clear the
ground for stocking it with cattle or cultivating it for crops, or alter¬
natively he may treat them as valuable natural resources to be carefully
conserved and efficiently exploited. The pioneer’s choice of economic
policy will be determined partly by his estimate of the value of the
natural environment and partly by his own temperament; but, whatever
the policy that he may elect to adopt, and whatever the considerations

DEHUMANIZATION 575

or feelings by which he may be prompted, he will be acting in any event
on the assumption that he is morally at liberty to pursue his own best
interests as he sees them, without being called upon to treat the ‘Natives’
as anything but wolves to be exterminated or sheep to be shorn.

In previous contexts 1 we have found the classical practitioners of this
abominable social philosophy in those Eurasian Nomad hordes that had
succeeded occasionally in establishing their rule over conquered seden¬
tary populations. In their treatment of militarily routed fellow human
beings as if they were either game or livestock, the Ottoman empire-
builders were both as ruthlessly and as sublimely logical as the French
empire-builders were in their treatment of their subjects as barbarians;
and, while it was true that unemancipated French subjects were vastly
better off than the Ottoman ra’iyeh, it was also true that a human
domestic animal which an ‘Osmanli shepherd of men had successfully
trained into becoming an efficient human sheep-dog found open to his
talents an even more brilliant career than awaited the African ivolui
when he succeeded in becoming a French official or man of letters.

This parallel brings out the fact that, even when ‘under-dog’ is
stigmatized as a ‘Native’, it is not impossible for him, within ‘top-dog’s’
repressive social system, to cross the line dividing the human chattel
from the man of property. The American Negro colonists of Liberia,
whose African forebears had been not merely subjugated but uprooted,
enslaved, and deported across the Atlantic, had raised themselves to the
status of honorary Lords of Creation by acquiring unuprooted African
‘Native’ subjects of their own in the hinterland of the strip of West
African coast on which these Negro American freedmen had been in¬
stalled in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era by White American
philanthropists. Subjugated Scottish Highlanders who had been treated
as ‘Natives’ by their more recently disembarked Sassenach fellow
islanders within two hundred years of the time of writing, and sub¬
jugated Maoris who had received the same treatment from the still more
recent West European settlers in New Zealand within a hundred years
of the same date, had succeeded in the meantime in transforming them¬
selves en masse from ‘Natives’ into joint heirs of their own expropriated
kingdoms. 2

If it is thus possible for people to raise themselves from the depressed
status of an effectively subjugated ‘Native’ population, this feat of self¬
emancipation is less difficult for people on whose necks this inhuman
yoke has not yet been firmly fixed. In the social etiquette of the Modern
Western World there was a tacit convention that 'Natives’ had to be
recognized as being human after all if and when they succeeded in acquir¬
ing the economic technique, or, a fortiori , the military armaments, that
were the credentials of a Modern Western Great Power. ‘Natives’ and
‘Powers’ were mutually exclusive concepts for Modern Western minds,
and the exigency of this Modern Western way of thinking promptly
liberated a post-Pctrine Russia from the stigma of the opprobrious

• See, for example, I. i. 151-2 ar.d III. iii. 22-50.

* See II. i. 227,238, and 466, and V. v. 322-3 for the transformation of the Highlanders,
and V. v. 322 for the similar transformation of the Maoris.

S76 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
brious epithet, whereas the Russians’ Orthodox Christian co-rcligionists
who were the ‘Osmanlis’ ra'iyeh continued to be known as ‘Native
Christians’ in Western Christian parlance till they succeeded, in the
course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the Christian Era,
in carving out sovereign independent successor-states for themselves.
In virtue of the same principle of Western power politics the Japanese
ceased to be ‘Natives’ after the inauguration of the Meiji Era in a.d.
1868, while the Chinese continued to be 'Natives’ until they gradually
extricated themselves from the same status pari passu with the progres¬
sive abrogation of ‘the Unequal Treaties’ after the First World War.

In the Late Modern Age of Western history the English-speaking
Protestant West European pioneers of the Western Society’s expansion
overseas had been the worst offenders in committing the Nomad empire-
builders’ sin of making 'Natives’ out of alien human souls; and, in this
repetition of an old crime by a new criminal, the most sinister feature had
been the English-speaking peoples’ pronencss to go over the edge of a
further downward step' to which the ‘Osmanlis had never descended.
These West European 'Lords of Creation’ had been apt to clinch their
assertion of their victims’ political and economic nullity by going on to
stigmatize these ‘Natives’ as the spawn of ‘inferior races’. 1

» This moral lapse had recorded itself in a linguistic medium in the discrepancies
between the literal meaning of the phrase 'the English-speaking peoples’, the connota¬
tion of the term in its users minds, and the actual current usage of it. The connotation
was that the cream of the common heritage of the peoples speaking this West European
vernacular as their mother-tongue was not a mere community of speech but was a com¬
munity of political ideals and achievements—above all, parliamentary government, civil
liberty, and a respect for human personality which was the moral foundation of these
social institutions. On the other hand, the actual current usage belied this connotation
by tacitly leaving outside the English-speaking family circle those English-speaking
citizens of the United States whose physique denounced them as being Negroes of
African provenance.

2 The Protestant background of a Modem Western race-feeling has been examined in
II. i. 211—27. In this context it has been pointed out that, though this moral and intel¬
lectual aberration was inspired by an interpretation of the Pentateuch ( bic., pp. au¬
ra), this latter-day Protestant Western Christian reading of the Hebrew Scriptures had
no warrant in the traditional attitude of the Jews, whose consciousness of being distinct
from, and superior to, the rest of Mankind was founded on a belief that they were a
‘Chosen People’ in virtue of an historic Covenant made with Abraham by the One True
God, and not on a belief that they were scions of an aboriginally and indefeasibly
superior physical race (ibid., pp. 246—7J. The recognition that their enjoyment of their
privilege was contingent on their keeping their part of a contract between themselves
and God helped the Jews to resist their perpetual temptation to succumb to the sin of
hybris (as Kipling realized when he wrote the fourth stanza of his Recessional), while
the substitution 01 the optional physical rite of circumcision for the involuntary physical
imprint of race as the outward visible sign of membership in the Jewish Church made it
possible for Jewry to admit ei-devani Gentiles as proselytes. The Jews themselves never
fell into their Protestant Western Christian parodists’ error of ascribing a rigidly racial
significance to the historic distinction between 'the seed of Abraham’ and 'the Goyyim’
till the Zionists caught this psychic infection from their Nazi persecutors.

The true forerunners of the latter-day Western racialists were not the ‘Semitic’
strangers in their midst whose traditional attitude towards the Gentiles was mis¬
represented in this Gentile caricature of it. The first authentic racialists known to history
were those Aryan barbarian speakers of an Indo-European language who had broken
into the domains of the Sumeric Civilization in South-West Asia and the Indus Culture
in North-West India in the second quarter of the second millennium B.c. The curse of
Racialism was inflicted on India by this Aryan Vfllkenvanderung for the same reason
that explains its infliction on North America by the African Negro slave-trade. Both
these great wrongs perpetrated by the strong against the weak had the social effect of
suddenly bringing human beings of conspicuously diverse physique into intimate
physical contact with one another in political and economic circumstances in which the
representatives of one of the races were dominant, while the representatives of the other

DEHUMANIZATION 577

Of the four stigmata with which ‘under-dog’ had been branded by
‘top-dog’, this stigma of racial inferiority was the most malignant, and
this for three reasons . 1 In the first place it was an assertion of ‘under¬
dog’s’ nullity as a human being without any qualification, whereas the
appellations ‘Heathen’, ‘Barbarian’, and ‘Native’, libellous and injurious
though they might be, were merely denials of this or that human
quality and refusals of this or that corresponding human right . 2 In
the second place this racial dichotomy of Mankind differed from all
the religious, cultural, and politico-economic dichotomies alike in
fixing a gulf that was an impassable one 5 —at least in the belief of the

race were at this racially alien ‘ascendancy’s’ mercy. Thus, in hailing the Aryas as their
authorities for a policy of persecuting 'non-Aryans’ on the score of their racial diversity
from the Indo-European-speaking barbarians of Western Europe, the Nazis showed
themselves better students of History than those Pilgrim Fathers who had cited the
Israelites as their authorities for exterminating the ’Canaanite’ Natives of a New World
(see II. i. 211-12 and 465-7).

Those English pioneers of Western Christendom’s expansion overseas whose ships
carried them to India instead of North America virtually adopted the institution of
caste which a Hindu Society had inherited from its Indie predecessor (see pp. 207-13.
above). If they had been asked to justify themselves by showing reason why they should
not suffer the same condemnation as the Nazis, the last generation of the English
’ascendancy' in India would perhaps have pleaded that they had not embraced a doc¬
trine of Racialism deliberately and selfconsciously, but had merely succumbed in¬
sensibly and involuntarily to the effects of an Indian social atmosphere that had proved
too potent for them to resist; and this line of defence might have secured them their
acquittal if the Indian descendants of previous Muslim conquerors of the Hindu World
had not confuted their English successors’ specious plea by the accomplished fact of
their Muslim sires’ intermarriage with their Hindu converts. This Indian Muslim feat
of breaking the bonds of caste was a conclusive proof that an endemic Hindu Racialism
had no power to prevail, even on its own Indian ground, over the humanity of the
votaries of a Judaic religion that preached the brotherhood of Man as a corollary of its
belief in a common fatherhood of God which was all men’s birthright. The Arab,
Turkish, and Afghan Muslim conquerors of India had all been Whites, and the Turks
and Afghans had been of the same fair variety of the breed as India’s English invaders
from Western Europe and her Aryan invaders from the Eurasian Steppe. On this show¬
ing, English Christian virtue ought not to have been worsted by a challenge to which
Afghan Muslim virtue had responded with a sincerity which an impartial English
Christian observer was bound to admire. Moreover, the nineteenth-century and
twentieth-century Englishman in India ought to have found his Christian virtue come
more easily to him considering that he was only a pilgrim sojourning in India as in
a strange country (Hcb. xi. 13 and 9) where he had no intention of finding a permanent
home for himself and his offspring. The challenge presented by the geographical inter¬
mingling of peoples of conspicuously diverse race was more formidable for the White
citizen of the United States, and far more formidable for the White citizens of South
Africa, Southern Rhodesia, or Kenya, where the Whites, instead of constituting, as in
the United States, an overwhelming majority of the population, were heavily out¬
numbered by the Negro 'Natives’. It will be appreciated that the Indian Muslims had
always been in the predicament of these White settlers in Black Africa.

* The second and third of these points have been noticed already in II. i. 223-4.

* The inhuman treatment of ‘barbarians' by Modem Western masters of the art of
oceanic navigation is censured in a passage written by an English hand in the first
generation of the Late Modem Age of Western history:

‘The greatest invention that I know of in later ages has been that of the loadstone
.. . The vast continents of China, the East and West Indies, the long extent and coasts
of Africa, with the numberless islands belonging to them, have been hereby introduced
into our acquaintance and our maps, and great increases of wealth and luxury, but none
of knowledge, brought among us, further than the extent and situation of the country,
the customs and manners of so many original nations which we call barbarous, and I am
sure have treated them as if we hardly esteemed them to be a part of Mankind’ (Temple,
Sir William, in ‘An Essay upon the Ancient and Modem Learning’, first published in
A.D. 1690 in the second volume of the author’s Miscellanea).

3 A passionate desire to engrave in indelible letters the gulf which divided them from
barbarian aggressors who seemed like veritable human ogres explains the East Romans’
choice of the word 'Ayafnj^i ('Children of Hagar') to be their standing term of abuse
for the Normans. This spitefully chosen nickname accomplished two vindictive purposes

it c m. vnx U

578 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

•racialists 1 who had so deftly dug it along an alinement that left the diggers
comfortably ensconced, on the right side of the invidious dividing line,
in a Nordicized Abraham’s bosom. 2 In the third place the racial stigma
differed from the religious and cultural stigmata (though in this respect
it resembled the politico-economic stigma) in singling out for its cri¬
terion of distinction between one hypothetical kind of human being
and another the most superficial, trivial, and insignificant aspect of
Human Nature that could have been selected for this inauspicious pur¬
pose.

If the inhuman line between human sheep and human goats is to be
drawn at all, the religious and cultural tests have at any rate the most to
be said for them both, intellectually and morally; for the most important
and significant manifestation of the spirit of a spiritual creature is
assuredly his religion and, next to his religion, his secular culture, where¬
as the curve of his nose, the proportions of his skull, the strength of the
pigmentation under his skin, the shape of a segment of his hair, or any
other physical accident of his spiritual constitution and character that
we may care to name, tells us nothing about anything that concerns a
man’s relations with his fellow men, himself, and God. No doubt the
racialist will retort hotly that this is a caricature of his point of view,
inasmuch as it ignores his conviction that these physical characteristics
are outward visible signs of an inward spiritual grace in himself and

at one stroke. It exposed the hollowness of the Normans’ profession of Christianity
by assimilating them to the Muslim 'unbelievers’; and it branded their shame upon
them ineffaccably by proclaiming it to be an inborn quality of their race.

1 ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’ (Jer. xiii. 23) was the
text on which the Late Modem Western racialists founded their doctrine (see II. i. 209);
but, in the writer's day, this reed-staff threatened to pierce the hand that leant upon it
(2 Kings xviii. 21), by turning out to be an open question and not the rhetorical question
that it had been assumed to be by the militant doctrinaires who had put their trust in it.
The social history of the United States had shown that neither legislation nor the public
feeling of a dominant majority could prevent individual human beings of diverse race
from mating—even when the physical diversity was conspicuous—in a population in
which these diverse races were geographically intermingled. The result in the United
States had been a blending of races in which the gulf between the local representatives
of a ‘pure’ Negro race and a ‘pure’ White race had been bridged by intermediate shades
of every degree of colour from ‘near-Negro’ to ‘near-White’; and it was notorious that
appreciable numbers of ‘near-Whites’ were perpetually ‘passing’, without detection, out
of the ‘under-privileged’ into the unpenalized caste of North American Society. Mean¬
while, those citizens of the United States whose tincture of pigmentation was still too
strong to allow them to ‘pass’ were at any rate able to assimilate themselves physically
to their White fellow citizens to some extent by artificially uncurling their hair (see II. 1.
228); and, at the moment of writing, it was being rumoured that some enterprising man
of science had discovered a trick for bleaching Negro skins by reducing the strength of
their pigmentation to the quantity present in skins popularly described as ‘White’.

This application of Science to the socinl purpose of producing a physical meta¬
morphosis, which was a auestion of such lively interest for Negro citizens of the United
States, mattered less to Negro citizens of France, who did not feel the same urge to
‘pass’ physically because it was open to them, as we have seen, to arrive socially by a cul¬
tural avenue along which they would not find their progress impeded by any racial
barrier. The openness of this French road is illustrated in the story of an impromptu
repartee which Dumas pirt is reported to have made to an unsuccessful contemporary
French man of letters who had rashly given vent to his envy of the dusky star by saying

Diimti in tkr r>r«-ti nf iiiitmi,., ■ ‘On <•<<• m—<i.ur

singe; ma famille a commence 0C1 la vfitre a termini!’ It is perhaps questionable whether
this French colloquy is authentic or legendary, but it is certain that Booker Washington
could not have ventured, even on the north side of the Mason and Dixon line, to make
the equivalent repartee to a White fellow traveller in an American pullman car.
a Luke xvi. 22-26.

DEHUMANIZATION 579

absence of this grace in other breeds which on this account he stigmatizes
as inferior. It is indeed a fundamental and indispensable doctrine of the
false religion of Racialism that the racial characteristics discernible in
our human bodily physique are supposed to be correlated—and this
permanently and precisely—with hypothetical racial characteristics of
a psychic order;' but this dogma was a bare postulate which had never
been borne out by any scientific demonstration down to the time
of writing; and the burden of proof had still to be discharged by
the credulous before the task of disproof need be shouldered by the
sceptics.

If the conventional classification of physical races by differences in
strengths of pigmentation were adopted, provisionally and without preju¬
dice, for the sake of the argument, it would be found, as we have
ascertained in another context, 1 that, even within the relatively short
Time-span of five or six thousand years during which the species of
human society known as civilizations had been in existence up to date,
contributions to civilizations had been made by people of all colours
except the Black. Within the period of less than half that length which
had seen tire epiphany of the higher religions, contributions to the
spiritual life of these best-inspired activities of the spirit of Man had
also been made by people of all colours except the Black and the Red; 3
and a twentieth-century racialist who sought to justify his superstition
by drawing attention to the comparative spiritual sterility of the Red
and Black races so far could be confronted by a contemporary geo-

E pher-sociologist with evidence that the same sterility had been
played, within the same brief periods, by certain representatives of
the allegedly superior Brown, Yellow, and White races whose other
representatives had been demonstrating their spiritual prowess.

In the Westernizing World of the twentieth century of the Christian
Era there were still Brown, Yellow, and White, as well as Red and
Black, ‘Natives’ and ‘Barbarians’. In this place wc need not reproduce
our previous inventory of them. 4 Wc need only remark that the then
fast-dwindling pockets of Raw Whites in the Rif, the Atlas, Albania, the
Caucasus, Kurdistan, and North-Eastern Iran, who had not yet emulated
their former peers, the ci-devant ‘Wild Highlanders’ and ‘Wild Irish’ in
a Celtic Fringe of the British Isles, by catching a cultural infection from
their neighbours, were a less disconcerting spectacle for the representa¬
tives of Civilization in this age than the recently formed patches of Mean
Whites in the United States, 5 the Union of South Africa, and other
countries overseas which had been added to the domain of the Western
Civilization in its Late Modern Age by English-speaking colonists from
Western Europe. These Mean Whites were an alarming phenomenon,
because, unlike the Raw Whites, they were not laggard barbarians but

1 The unprovenness of this doctrine has been exposed in II. i. 208-9.

1 Sec the tables in II. i. 232 and 239.

» In II. i. y 2 - 3 , nn.6 and 7, it has been pointed out that the so-called 'Red Race’
and 'Yellow Race' were misnomers for arbitrarily dissociated fractions of a single-
Mongolo-American Race distinguished, not by the colour of the skin, but by the texture
of the hair and the set of the eyes.

« In II. i. 236. * See II. i. 466-7 »nd II. ii. 309-13.

580 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
were the lapsed successors of predecessors who had been bearers of the
Western culture of their day. Yet the lapsed Whites of Appalachia were
not so terrifying a portent as the apostate Whites who had risen up in
the writer’s generation within the European homeland of the Western
Civilization to preach and practise those perverse Neo-Pagan religions
Fascism and National Socialism in which a Western White Man had
deliberately repudiated a Western Christian spiritual heritage by revert¬
ing, like the Communist heirs of an Orthodox Christian spiritual heri¬
tage, to an idolatrous worship of Collective Humanity. 1

2. Zealotism and Herodianism
A Pair of Polar Standpoints

In the preceding chapter we have found that, in an encounter between
contemporaries in which an impact of an aggressively radioactive culture
on an alien body social has resulted in the penetration of the assaulted
party’s defences by the attacking forces, the inhumanity which is the
dominant party's characteristic response to the spiritual ordeal of finding
alien souls at his mercy is a single-track descensus Avemi in which the
only perceptible diversification of an essentially uniform reaction’s
character is produced by the passage to some lower step in the one-way
traffic down this sinister stairway. When we turn to examine the re¬
sponse of the party at bay against an inhuman enemy within its battered
gates, we are confronted with an apparent contrast; for the victim of a
successful assault seems to have a choice between two alternative pos¬
sible reactions which look at first sight as if they were not merely diverse
but antithetical.

For minds educated in a Christian tradition, the most familiar histori¬
cal embodiments of these two psychological poles are the opposite atti¬
tudes towards Hellenism, and contrary' policies for coping with it, of
two Jewish parties in the Palestinian province of the Syriac World in the
time of Christ that appear in the New Testament under the names
‘Zealots’ and ‘Herodians’. This example has the triple advantage of
being not only familiar but momentous, because the historic collision
between Hellenism and Jewry released the dynamic spirit of Chris¬
tianity, and not only momentous but illuminating, because these two
Jewish antithetical reactions to a pressure exerted by Hellenism were so
sharply pronounced that they can be used as indicators for detecting and
sorting out other instances of the same psychological phenomena in
other passages of the histories of encounters between contemporaries.

In that age, Hellenism was pressing hard upon Jewry on every plane
of social activity—not only in economics and in politics, but also in art,
ethics, and philosophy. No Jew could escape or ignore, turn where he
would, the question of becoming or not becoming a Hellene. It was a
question by which every Jew in that age was inevitably obsessed. The
only choice open to him was an apparent choice between alternative
ways of meeting this single insistent challenge; and this was the issue
over which the ‘Zealots’ and the ‘Herodians’ parted company to strike

1 See V. v. 334-7.

ZEALOTISM AND HE ROD IAN ISM 581

out separate paths for themselves in what might appear to be diametri¬
cally opposite directions.

The Zealot faction was recruited from people whose impulse, in face
of attacks delivered by a stronger and more energetic aggressive alien
civilization, was to take the manifestly negative line of trying to fend
off the formidable aggressor. The harder Hellenism pressed them, the
harder they strove, on their side, to keep themselves clear of Hellenism
and all its works, ways, feelings, and ideas; and their method of avoiding
contamination was to retreat into the spiritual fastness of their own
Jewish heritage, lock themselves up within this psychic donjon , close
their ranks, maintain an unbroken and unbending front, and find their
inspiration, their ideal, and their acid test in the loyalty and sincerity of
their observance of every jot and tittle of a traditional Jewish law.

The faith by which the Zealots were animated was a conviction that,
if they were thus meticulously conscientious in abiding by their ances¬
tral tradition and observing the whole of it and nothing else, without
ever again yielding to the temptation to go a whoring after other gods, 1
they would be rewarded by being given grace to draw from the jealously
guarded source of their own spiritual life a supernatural strength that
would enable them to repel the alien aggressors—no matter how over¬
whelming the aggressors’ superiority over the Zealots in material power
might appear to be on a matter-of-fact view. 2 The Zealot’s posture was
that of a tortoise who has withdrawn his head and feet into his shell, or
of a hedgehog who has tucked away his tender snout and pads inside the
prickly ball, with its chevaux-de-frise of spines all pointing outwards,
into which the shy animal has curled himself up as his retort to the ap¬
proach of a dangerous enemy. 3 (The Zealot’s sardonically observant

1 Judges ii. 17. Cp. Exod. xxxiv. x5—16; Lev. xvii. 7; Deut. xxxi, 16.

* This fundamental article of the Zealot’s faith has been given a classical expression
in 2 Macc. viii. 36, in the confession here put into the mouth of the Seleucid King
Antiochus IV's general Nicin&r after the disastrous repulse of his expedition against
Jerusalem circa 165 B.c. 'He was fain to confess, now, that the Jews had God Himself
for their protector, and, would they but keep His law’s, there was no conquering them!’
{The Old Testament neuly translated from the Latin Vulgate bv Mgr. Ronald A. Knox,
vol. ii (London 1949, Bums, Oates, & Washboume), p. >518). The original Greek runs:
Karr/yyekXtv vjtippayov [rov 0 e 6 v] jfxe iv to or ‘lovoalous 1 8itx rov rponov r oQrov
arpiurovi ebai rovs ‘JovSaCovs Sia »o &*o\ov 9 fiv roij Cm' aurop nportray pivots topois.

> This characterization of Zcalotism as a negatively defensive reaction to an appre¬
hension of danger is borne out by celebrated episodes in the domestic histories of the
Hellenic and the Western Civilization.

The conflict between traditional Hellenic religion—or superstition—^and the rational¬
ist intellectual enlightenment of the fifth century B.C. produced explosions of Zealotism
in Athenian souls subjected to unwontedly severe psychological stresses and strains by
the great Atheno-Peloponnesian War of 431-404 B.c. and by the great plague which
in 430-429 B.c. and again in 427 B.c., ravaged a city overcrowded by refugees from an
invaded country-side. This Athenian wave of Zealot feeling manifested itself in a series
of prosecutions of prominent 'intellectuals' on charges of offences against Attic religious
orthodoxy (sec VII. vii. 472). The scries began with the prosecutions of the resident
aliens Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (? in absentid and not nominatim) and Aspasia of
Miletus (perhaps both as moves in the temporarily successful political campaign against
Pericles, which led to his fall in 430 b.c.), and it was continued in the throng of prosecu¬
tions in and after 415 B.c., when, besides the judicial proceedings against the alien
philosophers Protagoras of Abdera and Diagoras of Melos, the native Athenian aristo¬
crat-politician Alcibiades was prosecuted on the same charge of having profaned the
Eleusinian Mysteries, and a regular witch-hunt was set on foot to find human scape¬
goats to atone for the mutilation of the Hermae. The climax and conclusion of the series
was the prosecution of Socrates in 399 B.C. (Sec Secck, O.: Geschichte des Untergangs der
Antiken Welt, vol. iii, 2nd ed., Stuttgart 1921, Metzler), pp. 47-48; Adcock, F. E., in

582 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
Herodian rival would, no doubt, have been more inclined to describe
his foolish brother’s attitude as that of an ostrich who has buried her
head in the sand). The Zealot’s watchwords were Debout les mortsV and
‘Upon this rock I will build My Church and the gates of Hell shall not
prevail against It’. 2

The anti-Zealot Herodian faction was recruited from the servants,
supporters, and admirers of an opportunist statesman whose Idumaean
provenance worked together with his personal genius to enable this son
of a recently incorporated ci-devant Gentile province of a Seleucid
Hellenic Monarchy’s Maccabacan Jewish successor-state to take a
fresher and less prejudiced view of Jewry’s Hellenic problem than was
open to contemporary Judaean Jews, whose line of vision had been
so heavily depressed by the crushing incubus of a long accumulated
cultural heritage that their horizon was confined within the patch of
ancestral ground to which their feet were rooted. 3 Herod the Great’s

The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. v (Cambridge 1927, University Press), pp. 477-8;
Nilsson, M. P.: Greek Popular Religion (New York 1940, Columbia University Press),
p. 122).

In the legal proceedings involving Anaxagoras and Aspasia and in the trial of Socrates,
popular feeling was no aoubt exploited for political purposes. This motive in the pro¬
secution of Socrates has been noticed already in the present Study in VII. vii. 472;
and, in recording Diopcithcs’ motion for the prosecution of 'disbelievers in the super¬
natural and teachers of theories about the heavenly bodies’, Plutarch, in his Pender,
chap. 32, states that Diopeithes was 'gunning for’ {irrepeiiopevos tlf) Pericles by ex¬
ploiting the feeling against [Pericles’ mend and prot<g<] Anaxagoras. But cherchez la
politique is not an adequate explanation of the outburst in 415 B.c. 'On this occasion a real
religious hysteria broke out, for these events took place just before the great fleet sailed
for Syracuse’ (Nilsson, op. dt., loc. dt.).

These manifestations of Zealotism at Athens during the Atheno-Peloponnesian War
on the eve of the expedition against Syracuse had their counterparts at Rome during the
Hannibalic War on the morrow of the Roman disaster at Cannae. When, at this juncture,
two Vestal Virgins were found guilty of having broken the tabu against their indulging
in sexual intercourse, one of them was punished by being buried alive, while the other

a escaped this fate by an anticipatory suicide. One of the seducers, who was a ponti-
clerk (seriba pontificit), was beaten to death by the Pontifex Maximus in person.
But these savage punishments of members of the Roman ofiidal religious establishment
who had been convicted of a ritual offence are not so horrifying as the propitiation of an
angry Roman Pantheon by the gruesome rite of burying alive in the Forum Boarium
four innocent aliens: a male and female Greek and a male and female Gaul (sec Fowler,
W. Warde: The Religious Experience of the Roman People (London 1911, Macmillan),
pp. 319-20).

In the Early Modem Age of Western history an Athenian Zealot reaction against a
rationalist enlightenment that had culminated in the judicial murder of Socrates had
its counterpart in a.d. 1600 in the judicial murder of Giordano Bruno by a death which
was as cruel as the deaths inflicted on their victims by Etruscan-minded pagan Roman
ecclesiastical authorities in the panic following the catastrophe at Cannae.

' The heroically absurd word of command by which, according to a legend of the
World War of a.d. 1914-18, a French subaltern, turned Tcrtulfian-minded by the
exaltation of despair, had conjured up into action again the no longer living effectives
required for repelling an irresistible German assault on a trench which the Frenchman
had been ordered to hold at all costs.

* Matt. xvi. 18.

J It is no accident that the Idumaean Jewish statesman who offered to the Jews of his
day a mundane solution of their Hellenic problem should have shared with the Galilaean
Jewish Saviour who offered to them the insight to sublimate the same problem on to the
spiritual plane the one common characteristic of being the offspring of new ground
beyond the limits of a hard-baked Judaea. The cultural background of ‘Galilee of the
Gentiles’ has been indicated in II. ii. 73-74 and in V. vi. 477-8 and 499. The policy
of Herod the Great has been touched upon in V. vi. 123. This ex-Gentile statesman who
forcibly kept a post-Alexnndrine Palestinian Jewry out of trouble during his lifetime
by compelling them to allow him to manage their affairs is 'the opposite number’ of an
ex-Jewish statesman who rehabilitated a nineteenth-century British Conservative Party
by inducing them to place the management of their affairs in his hands. If Herod showed

ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 583

prescription for Jewry’s problem of coping with Hellenism was, first, to
take the objective measure of this alien social force’s irresistibly superior
power with a sober eye, and then to learn and borrow from Hellenism
every Hellenic accomplishment that it might prove necessary for the
Jews to acquire for the judicious and practicable purpose of equipping
themselves for holding their own, and even contriving to lead a more or
less comfortable life, in the Hellenizing World that was their inescap¬
able new social environment.

In a Zealot’s eyes this Herodianism was a compromise that was as
dangerous as it was impious and cowardly; but the Herodians could
argue plausibly on behalf of their policy that it was preferable to the
Zealots’ impulse in every respect that was of any practical consequence.
It was positive instead of being negative, and was therefore free to be
active instead of condemning itself to be passive, whereas the Zealot line
was hopelessly passive in spirit, however violently it might simulate
activity in its foolhardy physical exercises. More than that, the Hero¬
dians could represent that, in following their own line, they were ex¬
hibiting a greater moral courage than any to which the Zealots could lay
claim, since the attitude which the Zealots denounced as an Herodian
opportunism was in truth simply the realism of minds strong enough to
look facts in the face without flinching, to take these indisputable facts
as they were, and to frame a straightforward policy on this firm basis.

Hellenism, the Herodians would say, was a hard fact which had suc¬
cessfully intruded itself into Jewry’s social universe, and from which
there was no possibility of escape. The Zealots’ attitude of uncompro¬
mising non-recognition of the presence and power of this triumphant
alien force was an attitude of moral cowardice entailing an impolicy of
impossibilism that courted certain defeat. The one effective way for
Jewry to cope with Hellenism was for the Jews to take to heart the mani¬
fest limitations of their own power; to recognize that their social universe
could never be the same again since the emergence of Hellenism above
the Syriac World’s horizon; and to grasp, and act upon, the truth that
Hellenism could be fought successfully only by the adoption of Hellenic
weapons. According to the Herodian exposition of the case, the real
choice lay between a voluntary Hellcnization of Jewish life to whatever
extent might be found necessary in the course of an empirical solution
of the Hellenic problem ambulando, and an irresponsible Zealot impulse
to ride for a fall in which Judaism would succumb to Hellenism alto¬
gether—with nothing to show for such a stupidly purposeless sacrifice
beyond the poor consolation of having managed to make the mock-
heroic Zealot gesture of shaking an infantile fist in an unimpressed
Destiny’s face. The Herodian’s watchwords were Fas est et ab hoste
doceri 1 and ‘when you are in Rome, do as Rome does’. And, if a Zealot
had been shocked by the Herodian’s impiety into putting to him the
searching question, 'Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit

himself less adroit than Disraeli in proving unable to carry out his policy without resort¬
ing to the crude expedient of repression, this was because, of these two audacious
political acrobats, the ex-Gentile had committed himself to performing the greater lour
deforce.

* Ovid: Metamorphoies, Book IV, 1. 428.

584 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
unto his stature?', 1 the Herodian would have replied without hesitation
that he, for one, could answer that question in the affirmative—an
answer indicating that, in spite of his air of rationalism, the Herodian,
like the Zealot, was actuated by a faith which, in its Herodian vein, was
perilously akin to hybris.

A Survey of Zealot and Herodian Reactions 2

We cannot listen to the Herodian’s and the Zealot’s competitive ex¬
positions of their cases without being moved to ask ourselves two ques¬
tions. How do these melodramatically contradictory attitudes stand to
one another in fact? And does either of them prove to be an effective
retort to the successful penetration of an assaulted body social by the
cultural radiation of an aggressive alien society which is the common
challenge evoking both these ostensibly opposite responses? It would be
premature, however, to take up cither of these questions before making
a wider survey of the field of our present inquiry; for the two psycho¬
logical reactions which we have just identified in the attitudes, and
labelled with the names, of two factions which disputed between them
the protagonist’s role on the stage of Palestinian Jewish politics during
the hundred years ending in a.d. 70 can, of course, be detected in many
other passages of history; and these other manifestations of them may
be expected to throw further light on their respective characters and on
their mutual relations.

In the history of the Jews’ encounter with Hellenism—to look no
farther afield than this episode, for the moment—the phenomenon of
Herodianism is already discernible by a date that anticipates Herod the
Great’s seizure of power in the Hasmonaean Jewish principality in
Palestine by at least a century and a half. Even if we reject as unhistorical
the legendary account of the Septuagint’s translation of the Jewish scrip¬
tures from the Hebrew and Aramaic into the Greek by a Ptolemaic royal
command in the reign of Philadclphus (regnabat 283-245 b.c.), 3 we can
trace the beginnings of a voluntary sclf-rfcllenization of the immigrant
Jewish community in Alexandria right back to the infancy of this melt¬
ing-pot city on the morrow of its founder’s death; and even in the com¬
paratively secluded hill-country of Judaea the High Priest Joshua-Jason,
who is the archetype of the Herodian school of statesmanship, was busy
as early as the fourth decade of the second century b.c. on his devil's
work (as it appeared in Zealot eyes) of seducing his younger colleagues
in the Jewish hierarchy into an indecently naked exposure of their bodies
in an Hellenic palaestra and a shockingly vulgar screening of their heads
under the broad brim of an Hellenic petasus* The damnatio memoriae
through which Jason’s Herodian escapade has been immortalized in the

1 Matt. vi. 27.

? Much of the evidence cited in the following survey has already been presented in
this Study in other contexts, especially in Part IX B, in the present volume, and in V. v.
58-712 and V.vi. t-132, as well as in V. vi. 213-42. In the present chapter, references are
given to the revelant passages in Part V but not to those in Part IX B.

» According to Edwyn Bcvan, in A History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty
(London 1927, Methuen), p. : 12, the translation of the Old Testament was made, bit
by bu, in Egypt during the last three centuries before the Christian Era’.

4 Sec V - vi - *° 3 - 5 . with the passage quoted from 2 Macc. iv. 7-17 on p. 104, n. 1.

ZEALOTISM AND HEROD I AN ISM 585

Second Book of Maccabees is a revealing exhibition of the animus that
Herodian policies arouse in Zealot hearts; and this provocation in high
places at Jerusalem duly evoked a 'Zealot' reaction at least five genera¬
tions before these anti-Hellenic Jewish fanatics had eventually acquired
their historic soubriquet from a zeal for the Lord 1 * 3 which had long since
eaten them up.*

Nor was Jewish Zealotism crushed out of existence by the military
and political catastrophe of a.d. 70, nor even by its conclusive repetition
in A.n. 135 ; s for the gentle vein of Jewish Zealotism, consecrated in the
legends of the old scribe Eleazar and of the Seven Brethren and their
Mother, 4 which had declared itself before the alternative violent vein
had found vent in the militancy of the Maccabees, came into its own at
last when Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai responded to the tremendous
challenge of the fall of Jerusalem under the assaults of Titus’s storming
columns by endowing Jewry with an inertly rigid institutional frame¬
work and a passively obstinate psychological habitus that enabled it to
preserve its distinctive communal life in the frail clay tenement of a
politically impotent diaspora. 5

Jewry, however, was not the only Syriac community, nor the Syriac
Society the only Oriental Civilization, to be divided against itself into
an Herodian and a Zealot camp by the challenge of having to react to the
impact of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism in one way or other. The
Maccabaean-tempered Zealot insurrections of non-Jewish Syrian
plantation-slaves in Sicily in the latter decades of the second century
b.c. 6 were balanced at Rome, in the ensuing Imperial Age, by the
Herodian flow of a stream of Syriac freedmen-converts to Hellenism
which was satirized by a contemporary spokesman of an Hellenic domi¬
nant minority, in a celebrated phrase, as a noisome and unnatural dis¬
charge of the Orontes into the Tiber. 7 Conversely, the Herodianism of
a more well-to-do and more sophisticated stratum of the Syriac Society,
which an Hellenic dominant minority was prepared to take into social
partnership with itself on terms of virtual equality, was balanced by the
conscription of other Syriac higher religions, besides Judaism, for the
spiritually irrelevant and desecrating Zealot fatigue duty of serving as
instruments for the waging of a secular cultural warfare. Zoroastrianism, 8
Nestorianism and Monophysitism, 9 and Islam 10 all, in turn, followed
Judaism’s lead in making this spiritually disastrous deviation from
Religion’s true path. Yet the last three of these perverted religious
movements all eventually made some subsequent atonement for their
Zealot aberration by the Herodian act of translating into their Syriac
and Arabic liturgical languages the classical works of Hellenic philo¬
sophy and science; and the Oriental manuscripts which survived in
twentieth-century Western libraries to bear witness to the Herodian

1 2 Kings x. 16.

J Psalm lxix. 9, quoted in John ii. 17. Cp. Psalm cxix. 139.

3 See V. v. 68. * a Macc. vi. 18-vii. 42, cited in V. v. 72.

s See V. v. 75-76. 6 Sec V. v. 69-72 and V. vi. 238-9.

1 Juvenal: Satires, No. Ill, 11 . 60-80, quoted in V. v. 67.

8 Sec V. v. 12S-6 and 659-61.

» See V. v. 127-8.

B 2888 . vm

10 See V. v. 673-9*
U 2

586 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
life-work of these assiduous translators would count for more in a judi¬
cious historian’s estimation than the legend that the Caliph ‘Umar had
given orders for the burning of the books in the library at Alexandria.'

In this pharos from which, by ‘Umar’s day, an Hellenic intellectual
light had been streaming out into an encompassing Oriental darkness for
a thousand years, the way had been prepared for the Syriac intellectual
Herodians of the ‘Abbasid Age by a Jewish Philo 2 and a Christian
Clement and Origen. 3 And even a stubborn Iranian rear-guard of the
Syriac World’s anti-Hellenic battle-order, which was not called upon to
face the fire of Hellenism at the murderously point-blank range at which
this artillery was discharged against a devoted Jewish vanguard, had to
suffer first the annoyance of seeing a militantly Zealot anti-Hellenic
Zoroastrian Church’s domestic competitor, Mithraism, take an Herodian
path into a mission field in partibus Hellenids, where Zoroastrianism had
made itself too odious to gain an entry, and then the humiliation of see¬
ing the Zoroastrian True Faith itself sacrilegiously ‘processed’ for export
to the Hellenic World by the ingeniously Herodian-mindcd heresiarch
Mani. 4

When we turn to consider the reactions to Hellenism in the other
Oriental societies that had shared the Syriac World’s experience of being
subdued by Hellenic arms in and after the generation of Alexander the
Great, we find the outburst of Jewish Zealotism in Judaea in the fourth
decade of the second century b.c. being anticipated in the last decade of
the third century b.c. by a Zealot emeute in Egypt, s while the swift
failure of Joshua-Jason’s audacious Herodian attempt to Hellenize the

K :hood of the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem was balanced in the
tiac World by the eventual success of a gradual movement towards
converting the metropoleis of the Egyptian nomes into simulacra of
Hellenic municipalities which began with the enrolment of young native
Egyptian notables as Hellenic gymnasiasts. 6 In a post-Alcxandrine
Babylonia a dwindling band of astronomer-priests, who were fighting a
losing battle to preserve a more and more esoteric native cultural heri¬
tage against an invading Syriac culture’s progressive encroachments,
were so zealously bent on eluding the contaminating touch of the Syriac
aggressor who was delivering this frontal attack that they inadvertently
leaned over backwards into an Herodian Philhellenism; 7 and it was no
accident that in a later act of this play with three dramatis personae a
fossilized remnant of the Babylonic Society which had managed to keep
its head above the encompassing Syriac flood-waters on an unsubmerged
Mesopotamian islet at Harran should have taken a hand in the intel¬
lectual conversion of the Syriac Society to Hellenism in the ‘Abbasid
Age. 8 In an Indie World which had been forced into an intimate contact
with Hellenism by the Bactrian Greek war-lord Demetrius’s invasion of

« See V. vi. iri-12.

J See V. v. 366-7 end 539.

See V. v. 539 - 40 .

4 An "Ppreciation of the respective relations in which Mithraism and Manichaeism
atood to Hellenism has been offered in V. v. 575-8. » Sec V. v. 68.

* See VI. vii. S o, and pp. 408 and 443 - 4 . above.

7 See V. v. 94 and 123, n. 2.

1 The work of the Harrfni Thabit b. QurrS has been noticed on p. 408, n. 5, above.

ZEALOTISM AND HEROD IAN ISM 587
the Mauryan Empire’s domain circa 183 b.c., we can likewise observe
symptoms of our two familiar alternative psychological reactions in the
Herodian Philhcllenism of a Mahayanian Buddhist religious art 1 and in
the anti-Hellenic vein in a Zealot-minded Hinduism.

This survey of the psychological reactions in the societies which en¬
countered an aggressive post-Alexandrine Hellenism would be incom¬
plete if we failed to notice one figure whose attitude cannot be accounted
for adequately unless we are prepared sometimes to find the Herodian
and the Zealot nature both incarnate in the same person. Mithradates
VI Eupator, the Iranian-descended king of a successor-state of the
Achacmcnian Empire on the Hittite soil of Pontic Cappadocia, 2 pre¬
sented an attractively Herodian countenance to the eyes of European
as well as Asiatic Hellenes who welcomed him in 88 b.c. as their de¬
liverer from a barbarous Roman yoke; yet the same war-lord wore the
opposite appearance of an anti-Hellenic Zealot to the Cyzicenes who
closed their city’s gates against him in 74 B.c. and greeted the Roman
general Lucullus as their saviour from the doom of falling under the
alien yoke of an Oriental despot. The cultural ambivalence of this North-
East Anatolian actor on a post-Alexandrine Hellenic stage is reminiscent
of the enigma presented, in the pre-Alexandrine chapter of the same
Hellenic story, by a Ducetius 3 who, after having made his name as the
unsuccessfully gallant Zealot leader of his Sicel fellow barbarians in the
last round of their losing battle against Hellenic imperialism, lived to
return to Sicily from an exile in the heart of the Hellenic World on
the Herodian errand of founding in his homeland a new commonwealth
in which Greek colonists and Sicel natives were to fraternize with one
another in virtue of the natives’ voluntary adoption of the intruders’
alien culture.

If we pass on now to glance at the psychological reactions manifested
in the societies that encountered a Medieval Western Christendom, we
shall find the most thorough-going practitioners of Herodianism known
to History up to date in those ci-devant pagan Scandinavian barbarian
invaders who, as a result of one of the earliest and most signal of all
Western cultural victories, became the Norman exponents and propa¬
gators of a Medieval Western Christian way of life. The Normans pro¬
ceeded to embrace not only the religion but the language and the poetry
of the Romance-speaking Western Christian native population of the
successor-state that they had carved for themselves out of a Gallic
province of the Carolingian Empire. When the French-named Norman
minstrel Taillefer lifted up his voice to inspire his fellow knights as they
were riding into battle at Hastings, he did not recite to them the Vdl-
iungasaga in Norse but chanted to them the Song of Roland in French ; 4
and, before William the Norman Conqueror of England high-handedly
promoted the growth of a nascent Western Christian Civilization by a
military act of self-aggrandizement which brought a backward and
isolated province of Western Christendom under the influence of
the metropolitan culture of the West in the most progressive of its

* See V. v. 58 and 540.

> See V. vi. 235-6.

* See V. v. 69.

* See II. ii. aox.

588 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
contemporary versions, other Norman military adventurers had embarked
on the enterprise of enlarging the bounds of the Western Christian
World in the opposite quarter through conquests at the expense of
Orthodox Christendom and D5r-al-Islam in Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily.

The readiness of the Scandinavians to divert their psychic energy
from the creative task of building up a promisingly precocious civiliza¬
tion of their own to the Herodian pursuit of adopting some alien civiliza¬
tion over whose native representatives they had established their military
ascendancy was displayed in the adhesion of Scandinavian converts to
other cultures besides that of Western Christendom, and in the conver¬
sion, not only of a vanguard that had planted itself within]the domains of
the civilizations to whose attractions it succumbed, but also of a rear¬
guard that received these alien culture-rays either in some barbarian
no-man’s-land or in the Vikings’ Scandinavian home. The adoption of
the Western Christian Civilization by the Scandinavian settlers in Nor¬
mandy and the Danelaw, the influence of Byzantine and Islamic art and
institutions on the Norman conquerors of Sicily, and the tincture of Far
Western Christian Celtic culture that was acquired by the Ostmen in
Ireland, and by the Norse colonists in the Western Isles, Iceland, and
Greenland, are not such remarkable exhibitions of Herodianism—re¬
markable though they arc—as the eventual conversion of the Scandina¬
vian communities in and beyond the Celtic Fringe and in Scandinavia
itself to the Western Christian culture, or as the adoption of the Ortho¬
dox Christian culture by the Russian Scandinavian conquerors of Slav
barbarians in the basins of the Dniepr and the Neva. 1

In the encounters between the representatives of a nascent Scandina¬
vian Civilization and their culturally alien neighbours, this Herodian
tide had no difficulty in sweeping off their feet the ‘die-hard’ Zealot
champions of an indigenous Scandinavian culture, though this original
creation of the Scandinavian genius had a value which was worth pre¬
serving and a charm which might have been expected to inspire a more
enthusiastic defence, while the victorious alien cultures had no physical
force of their own, beyond the right arms of their Scandinavian converts,
to pit against the spiritually abashed but militarily undefeated Berserkers.
When we turn to survey the psychological reactions evoked by the im¬
pact of Medieval Western Christendom on the Syriac World and on the
main body and the Russian offshoot of Orthodox Christendom, we find
the balance between Zealotism and Herodianism rather less uneven here.

In the Syriac World a predominantly Zealot reaction against Medieval
Western Christian aggression, which came to a head in an union sacrie of
D3r-al-Islam against the lodgements made in Syria by the Crusaders, 2
was set off to some extent by the Norman-minded Herodianism of the
Cilician Armenian Monophysite Christian converts to a contemporary
Western Christian way of life. In the main body of Orthodox Christen¬
dom a likewise predominantly Zealot reaction expressed itself, as we
have seen, in an execration of the Normans as ‘Children of Hagar’ and
in a refusal to accept ecclesiastical union with the Western Christian

1 These conversions of divers Scandinavian communities to divers alien cultures have
been noticed in II. ii. 348-55. * See V. v. 354, and pp. 353-6 above.

ZEALOTISM AND HEROD IAN ISM 589

Church at the price of acknowledging the Papacy’s supremacy over the
Eastern Orthodox Churches, even though the manifest price of non-
acceptance was the doom of falling under Ottoman Turkish Muslim
rule; yet this demonically Zealot Orthodox Christian antipathy towards
an aggressive sister Christian civilization was tempered, in a few East
Roman hearts and minds, by an Herodian appreciation, not only of the
expediency of an unpalatable ecclesiastical union, but of the nobility of
the Western ideal of chivalry and the fertility of the audacious Western
innovation of employing the currently spoken vulgar tongue as a vehicle
for literature. 1

In the victorious revolt of Orthodox Christian Zealotism against an
ecclesiastical union under Papal supremacy in accordance with the terms
agreed at the Council of Florence in a.d. 1439, the Orthodox Church in
Russia took the lead among the sundry national churches within the
Orthodox communion in the resistance to Western ecclesiastical aggres¬
sion, while the simultaneous Western political aggression against Russian
Orthodox Christendom in the shape of sweeping Polish and Lithuanian
conquests of derelict Russian territory, after the Mongols’ catastrophic
impact on Russia in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era had re¬
duced her to military and political impotence, was countered in Muscovy
by a political manifestation of Zealotism in the shape of an absolute
authoritarian state in which an East Roman tradition and ideal of auto¬
cracy were re-embodied in new institutions that were original creations
of the Russian political genius. Yet this Zealot seedling of Byzantine
autocracy at Moscow, which had originally been called into existence as
a windbreak against the icy blast of a Mongol Eurasian Nomad domina¬
tion before being used to defend an unsubjugated remnant of Russian
Orthodox Christendom against the predatory eastern marchmcn of a
Late Medieval Western Christian World, could not claim to be a more
characteristic Russian response to the challenge of Western pressure in
this age than the Herodian seedling of Medieval Western civic liberty
which was bedded out contemporaneously at Novgorod. 2

It is true that the Gleichschaltung of Novgorod’s Western-inspired
institutions and outlook, through the forcible incorporation of this
ci-devant sovereign city-state into the dominions of a Muscovite ‘Third
Rome’ in the eighth decade of the fifteenth century of the Christian Era,
gave the Zealot answer a definitive victory over the Herodian answer
to an insistent Western question in all parts of Holy Russia that had

« This contemporary Western example was the genial influence that encouraged the
buried living waters of a rudimentary vernacular Greek literature to ooze up into the
open through cracks in the ice-cap of a Byzantine classicism and to breed a native school
of drama alia Franca in Crete in the course of the long-maintained Venetian political
dominion over this Greek Orthodox Christian island (see pp. 392-4, above, and X. ix.

The voluntary entry of a Russian Orthodox Christian Novgorod into the commercial
and cultural comity of a Medieval Western city-state cosmos is a more conspicuous,
though more ephemeral, example of the cultural metamorphosis that is likewise exem¬
plified in the history of the city-states founded on the coasts and adjoining waterways
of Ireland by Ostmen who were kinsmen and contemporaries of Novgorod’s original
Scandinavian founders. In this context we may remind ourselves of a pre-Alexandrinc
Hellenic city-state cosmos’s success in winning the cultural allegiance of the colonial
city-states founded by the Hellenes’ Libyphoenician and Etruscan commercial and
political rivals in the Western Basin of the Mediterranean.

590 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
succeeded in keeping themselves politically inviolate from the stain of
subjection to an alien Western rule; yet, even after the fall of Novgorod,
Herodianism maintained an ascendancy over Zealotism during the next
three centuries in those Russian Orthodox Christian territories that had
been incorporated into the Western Christian kingdoms of Poland and
Lithuania. On the ecclesiastical plane this Herodian proclivity revealed
itself in a widespread—though not unchallenged and never all-em¬
bracing—acceptance of union with the Roman Church, on the terms
agreed in a.d. 1439, by the Polish and Lithuanian Crowns' ci-devant
Orthodox Christian subjects; 1 on the secular cultural plane the same
vein of Herodianism found expression in a spontaneous progressive self-
Polonization of the Orthodox and Uniate White Russian and Ukrainian,
as well as the Latin Catholic White Russian and Lithuanian, nobility
and gentry in the dominions of a Polish-Lithuanian United Kingdom.

Our pair of antithetical psychological reactions can also be detected in
the histories of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom’s and a Hindu
World’s respective encounters with an aggressive Iranic Muslim
Civilization.

In the main body of Orthodox Christendom under the Pax Otto-
manica, a majority of the ra'iyeh belonging to the Millet-i-Rum still
clung to an ancestral religion whose ecclesiastical independence they had
chosen to preserve at the price of submitting to an alien political regime;
yet this Zealotism was partially offset, even on the religious plane, by the
Herodianism of a minority who, from the fourteenth down to the seven¬
teenth century of the Christian Era, were lured into apostasy from
Christianity to Islam by tempting social advantages and dazzling political
prizes that were the rich rewards for conversion to the religion of an
Ottoman 'ascendancy ’. A political ambition, that had sometimes prompted
Orthodox Christian parents to welcome the conscription of their chil¬
dren into the Padishah’s Slave-Household, 2 became a far stronger incen¬
tive to Herodianism in the hearts of Orthodox Christian subjects of the
Porte when, in the course of the seventeenth century, new exigencies
created by the rising pressure of the Western Christian Powers upon the
Ottoman Empire moved the Porte to create new-fangled high offices of
state to be held by Orthodox Christian ra’iyeh without their being called
upon either to renounce their ancestral faith or to forfeit their personal
freedom. 3 Meanwhile, the rank-and-file of the Millct-i-Rum, who, short
of becoming free Muslims or Ottoman public slaves, did not enter the
Ottoman public service even as unconverted freemen, had long since

1 This comparative success of the Uniate movement among the Orthodox Christian
subjects of the Western Catholic Polish and Lithuanian Crowns, by contrast with its
signal failure among the Orthodox Christian subjects of an Orthodox Christian East
Roman Empire, was remarkable, considering that the Ukrainian and White Russian
converts to Uniatism lacked the political incentive which, in Greek Orthodox Christen¬
dom, had moved a sagacious Michael Palaioldghos to action as early as A.D. 1261 and
had become so obviously urgent there by a.d. 1439 that it could then be ignored there
only by a Zealot’s wilfully blind eyes. In Greek Orthodox Christendom the choice was
one between ecclesiastical union with Rome and subjection to an alien political yoke,
whereas the converts to Uniatism among the Orthodox subjects of Poland and Lithuania
could not imagine that they were purchasing their escape from a political calamity that
had already long since overtaken them.

* Sec III. iii. 37, n. 1. J See II. ii. 224-3.

ZEALOTISM AND HEROD I AN ISM 591

succumbed to Herodianism in much larger numbers in the more trivial,
yet nevertheless significant, ways of learning to talk their Ottoman
masters’ language 1 and to ape their dress.

The story of the Hindus’ psychological reaction to the rule of an
Iranic Muslim ‘ascendancy’ runs on much the same lines. While a vast
majority of the Hindu ra'iyeh of the Timurid Mughal Muslim emperors
of India and their Afghan and Turkish Muslim forerunners emulated
the Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh of the ‘Osmanlis in zealously resisting
the temptation presented by potent social and political inducements to
apostatize, there were local mass-conversions to Islam—particularly
among the socially depressed ci-devant pagan converts to Hinduism in
Eastern Bengal—that would appear to have been on a greater scale, not
only absolutely but also relatively to the total head of population in
question in either case, than the corresponding local mass-conversions
to Islam among the Albanian, the Epirot and Cretan Greek, and the
Pomak Bulgar Orthodox Christians and among the Bosniak Bogomils.
Moreover, the Brahmans showed the same alacrity as the Phanariots in
entering a Muslim Power’s public service as unconverted freemen, and
the same facility in adopting their Muslim masters’ language 2 and dress.

The history of an Iranic Muslim Society’s impact on the Orthodox
Christian and Hindu worlds also offers us two examples of psychological
ambivalence. The new religions founded by Sheykh Bedr-ed-Dln
Slmavly in a fifteenth-century Western Anatolia 3 and by Guru Nanak
in a fifteenth-century Panjab 4 were ostensibly expressions of a radical
Herodianism; for both prophets proclaimed the fraternity and equality,
on their own new common spiritual ground, of all their converts, what¬
ever their divers religious antecedents; and the common ground on
which, according to Nanak’s revelation, the traditional divisions between
Hindus and Muslims and between members of different Hindu castes
were no longer valid was an article of Nanak’s faith that was not of
Hindu but of Islamic provenance. Like all converts to Islam, all con¬
verts to Sikhism became one another’s brethren and peers in virtue of
their having all alike given their allegiance to one Lord whom they had
been taught to worship as the sole True Living God; and this tenet was
so fundamental that Sikhism might be described with no less truth than
brevity as an Hcrodian response to the impact of an Islamic monotheism
upon the Hindu consciousness. Yet these intellectually convincing
grounds for classifying Sikhism and Bedreddinism as expressions of
Herodianism would have seemed academically irrelevant to the Mughal
Emperors Jahangir and Awrangzlb, and to the Ottoman Emperor
Mehmcd I, when they were encountering their Sikh and BedreddinI
ra'iyeh on the battlefield in armed rebellion against an Islamic ‘ascen¬
dancy’; and, if these Iranic Muslim potentates had been required to
employ the psychological terminology of this Study, we may feel sure
that they would have entered the names of Har Govind, Govind Singh,
Bedr-ed-Dln, and MustafS Borkltije in the Zealot, not the Herodian,
column of our present inventory.

« Sec V. v. 514-22.

1 See V. v. hi and 537.

* See V. v. 514-22.

* See V. v. 106 and 665-8.

592 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

When we come to the encounters with the Modern Western Civili¬
zation which had overtaken all the contemporaries of this potently
expansive society, we see the offshoot of the Far Eastern Society in
Japan reacting to the impact of the West with vigour along both the
two alternative lines.

The strength of the Herodian current in Japan was demonstrated
more impressively by its persistence in adversity than by its exuberance
before it fell on evil days. The eager curiosity that inspired a facile adop¬
tion of the Western weapons, dress, 1 and religion imported by Portu¬
guese traders and missionaries during the honeymoon period, when
Japan was making her first acquaintance with the West in the latter
decades of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era, was justified by
the silent heroism of this dubious wisdom’s children 1 when, after the
Tokugawa regime had ordered its subjects, under pain of death as the
penalty for disobedience, to break off relations with the West and to re¬
nounce the imported Western religion,* a remnant of Japanese crypto-
Christians remained secretly loyal to their proscribed alien faith for
more than two hundred years—as became apparent when, after the
Meiji Revolution in a.d. 1868, it became possible for them at last, in the
ninth or tenth generation, to come out into the open again.

This second outburst of Herodianism in Japan in the middle decades
of the nineteenth century was also, as we have seen, partly the work of
other heroes who had risked and lost their lives in a non-religious Hero¬
dian cause by secretly studying Modem Western Science in a Dutch
medium without waiting for the fall of an intolerantly Zealot-minded
Tokugawa Shogunate. In the rediscovered light of these long-hidden
candles 4 the Meiji Revolution in its day looked like a deferred but defini¬
tive triumph of an Herodianism which had been the predominant vein
in the original Japanese response to the challenge of the West; yet, in
this second bout, as in the first, the experience of half a century was to
put a Zealot face on the reality behind Herodian first appearances—with
the implication, for an historian’s long-sighted eye, that the Tokugawa
period, in which Zealotism had been in the ascendant, had, after all, been
something more than an irrelevant interlude in a Japanese psychological
drama in which Herodianism was the ‘secular’ trend (in the economists’
technical use of the word).

The strength of the Zealot current in Japan had been indicated from
the outset by the assiduity with which the Japanese had equipped them¬
selves for holding their own against the formidable Western strangers by
the ostensibly Herodian feat of learning how to make, as well as use,
new-fangled Western fire-arms; and it was significant that the Tokugawa
Government, when it set itself to sever relations between Japan and the
West, cannily refrained from following up its veto on Western commodi¬
ties and Western religion by renouncing the employment of Western
weapons. This statesmanlike disregard for logic was justified by the
sequel; for the Tokugawa eventually forfeited a political ascendancy
founded on military force when their military impotence to prevent

' f cc y.' vi - I , oz - 1 Matt. xi. xo; Luke vii. 35.

J See V. v. 365. « Matt. v. 15; Mark iv. 21; Luke vail. :6 and xi. 33.

ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 593

Commodore Perry’s squadron from entering Yedo Bay in a.d. 1853
made it alarmingly manifest to the Japanese public that, in the course
of 215 years of deliberate self-isolation, the Bakufu had allowed its
stationary seventeenth-century Western armaments to be left so far
behind by the never-ceasing and ever-accelerating progress of Western
military technique that the regime had at last become altogether incom¬
petent to live up to its acknowledged raison d'itre of keeping the West
at arm’s length from the sacrosanct Land of the Gods. Between a.d.
1853 and a.d. 1868 this public zeal in Japan for an effective fulfilment of
the Tokugawa’s neglected Zealot mission displayed itself not only in a
growing insubordination towards the authority of this now discredited
indigenous regime but in a rising wave of xenophobia, foaming over
into physical assaults, against Western intruders whom, in the mean¬
while, the Bakufu had been constrained by Western political pressure
to readmit within its precincts; and the revolution in which a thus
patently irreclaimable Tokugawa regime was ruthlessly liquidated was
the work of descendants of Kyushuan pupils of the Portuguese who had
made up their minds to repeat their sixteenth-century ancestors’ achieve¬
ment of mastering Destiny by acquiring the superior military technique
of the West in its most up-to-date form.

While this Japanese revolution can be presented as a triumph for
Herodianism in the accurate statements that its economic programme
was a thorough-going adoption of the material technique of the con¬
temporary Western World and that its political programme was the
entry of Japan into the contemporary Western comity of nations, the
same revolution can be presented simultaneously as a triumph for
Zealotism in the likewise accurate statements that the intention inspiring
the technological revolution was to turn Japan into a Great Power of
the contemporary Western standard, and that she was resigning herself
to the necessity of entering the arena of Western power politics because
she had come to realize that this was the only condition on which she
could continue to hold her own against the West on the face of a planet
that had now been magnetized by Western arts into a single indivisible
field of force. The latent Zealotism of the strategy behind the Herodian¬
ism of Japan’s tactics during the three-quarters of a century ending in
a.d. 1945 was indeed divulged as early as a.d. 1882 in the official organiza¬
tion of the State ShintS, in which a resuscitated pre-Buddhaic paganism 1
was utilized as a vehicle for the deification of a living Japanese people,
community, and state through the symbolism of an archaistic cult of an
Imperial Dynasty that was reputed to be the divine offspring of the Sun

» The origin* of this archaistic Neo-Shinto movement can be traced back to the
seventeenth century of the Christian Era, and its antecedents to the fifteenth century
(see V. vi. 90, with n. 4). It was always suspect to the Tokugawa on account of its
potentialities for serving as the ideology for an alternative regime based on a revival
of the latent prestige of the Imperial Dynasty (sec ibid., p. 9 «. n. 3). The Tokugawa
regime had sought to parry this threat to its stability by patronizing rival religions and
philosophical movements. It had favoured the Mahiylna and had encouraged an archa¬
istic revival, not of Shintd, but of Confucianism (sec ibid., pp. 90-91, and Murdoch, J.:
A History of Japan, vol. iii (London 1026, Kcgan Paul), p. 97). In promoting the pro¬
pagation in Japan of a Ncoconfucian Movement that had originated in contemporary
China, the Bakufu was employing Herodian tactics for attaining its Zealot strategic
objective.

594 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
Goddess and that offered its hereditary collective divinity for worship
here and now in the epiphany of a god perpetually incarnate in the
person of the reigning Emperor. 1

It will be seen that, during the four hundred years ending in a.d. 1952,
the Japanese psychological reaction to the ordeal of encountering the
West had been ambivalent through and through.

The ultimately Zealot motive underlying a superficially Herodian-
looking policy that has here been ascribed to the Japanese in and after
the Meiji Revolution of a.d. 1868 was ascribed to the contemporary
Chinese, on the morrow of the consummation of the Kuomintang
Revolution in China in the third decade of the twentieth century, by a
learned and acute student of Far Eastern history who was inclined at
that date to take current Japanese Herodianism at its face value, or at
any rate to judge that the latter-day Japanese importers of Western cul¬
tural wares were deceiving themselves in so far as they seriously expected
to succeed, by the sophisticated means of a nicely calculated and strictly
regulated dole of cultural rations, in eluding our empirically established
social ‘law’ that, when once a society’s defences have been penetrated by
the radiation of an intrusive alien culture, ‘one thing leads to another’
inexorably until, willy nilly, the assaulted party has to resign himself to
adopting the assailant’s way of life in toto.

‘The first approach of the West was resisted in Japan, as in China; but,
when Perry demonstrated that the West “amounted to something”, the
effect approximated to a revelation, and was so accepted. ... It is China,
on the contrary’, which has endeavoured to use the weapons of the West
to preserve itself from the West.... The whole history of Chinese relations
with the West implies an underlying instinctive playing for time, in the
hope that the West would exhaust itself and China be able to assert once
more the superiority of which the Chinese are morally convinced.’ 1

Twenty years after the publication of the book from which these pas¬
sages arc quoted, at a moment when Japan was under Western military
occupation and China was under the rule of an indigenous Communist
regime, it was manifestly rash to make a more than tentative and provi¬
sional estimate of the ‘secular’ psychological trend in either of these two
provinces of the Far Eastern World; but it was nevertheless possible to
observe unmistakable symptoms of both Herodianism and Zealotism in
this episode of Chinese history, and also to notice certain likenesses and
differences between the Chinese and the corresponding Japanese episode
in respect of both the interplay and the relative strengths of the two
alternative reactions.

The light-hearted adoption of current Western fashions by latc-six-
teenth-century and early-seventcenth-century Japanese barons and their
retainers had its counterpart in the frivolous curiosity in regard to astro¬
nomical instruments and other toys of Modern Western Science that the
Jesuit guests at the Imperial Court in Peking had the wit to arouse in
the minds of Ming and Manchu emperors and Confucian litterati; yet

1 See V. v. 707, n. 2, and V. vi. 93.

1 Lutimore, O.: Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict (New York 1932, Macmillan), pp.

ZEALOTISM AND HE ROD I AN ISM 595

in China, as in Japan, the interest in Western fire-arms was both more
serious and more sinister; and in China, as in Japan, again, adversity, in
the severe form of official persecution, demonstrated the sincerity of the
Herodianism of converts who became martyrs to their alien Christian
faith,' while the eventual obsolescence of the ban on the profession of
Christianity brought to light the persistence of Herodianism on the
religious plane in China likewise when a fresh harvest of converts was
reaped there by nineteenth-century successors of the proscribed Early
Modern Western Christian missionaries.

This second wave of Herodianism was transmitted, in China too, from
the religious plane, on which it first made its reappearance, to the secular
planes of education and business. Mission-educated Chinese converts to
Protestantism completed their studies in the universities of the United
States, and penurious Chinese emigrants established themselves in force
as efficient and prosperous Westernizing business men in a number of
South-East Asian countries—the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, Indo-
China, and Burma—that had fallen under Western rule and had inconse¬
quence been incorporated into a Westernizing World on the economic
plane as well as the political. 2 This Chinese commercial diaspora, as well
as the Chinese alumni of Western educational campuses on both Chinese
and Western ground, had played a part, out of proportion to their num¬
bers, in an Herodian political movement—Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang—
which had attempted in the second quarter of the twentieth century of
the Christian Era to emulate the achievement of the Japanese authors of
a Meiji Revolution who had succeeded in obtaining admittance for their
country into the contemporary comity of Western states on a footing of
equality with the original members of the club.

On the other hand, a Zealotism that had gained the upper hand in
Japan eventually—in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century'—had
declared itself in China promptly at the beginning of the history of
Chinese intercourse with the West. Ming emperors who had welcomed
Western apostles of Christianity to their imperial capital had anticipated
the Tokugawa Government’s tardy precaution of confining the Dutch
remnant of a Western commercial community in Japan to the islet of
Deshima; for the Chinese imperial authorities had never permitted
Western traders of any nation to reside on Chinese soil outside the con¬
fines of the Portuguese settlement at Macao and the mudbank of Sha-
meen in the West River off the water-front at Canton, which was made
to serve the purpose of a convict hulk for the internment of Western
traders of all nations during their strictly limited and regulated seasonal
visits. Even after the jealously locked, barred, and bolted gates of a
Chinese Earthly Paradise had been blown in by British naval broadsides
in the Sino-British ‘Opium War’ of a.d. 1839-42, a humiliatingly de¬
feated Chinese Government still managed, in the ensuing peace settle¬
ment, to prevent the now inevitable enlargement of the resident Western

» The Battle of the Rites and its tragic outcome have been noticed in V. v. 366-7 and
539 .

2 The Chinese diasporih in Siam should be added to this list, notwithstanding Siam’s
success in preserving her political independence down to the time of writing.

596 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
traders’ ‘pale’ from being extended beyond half a dozen specified ‘treaty
ports’. Missionaries of the Christian religion were the only Westerners
who were then granted the privilege of travelling and residing at will
throughout the length and breadth of Chinese territory; and the pro¬
gressive increase in the number of Western treaty ports and in the weight
of Western influence in China in the course of the last six decades of the
nineteenth century provoked a cumulative resentment in Chinese hearts
which culminated in demonic eruptions of militant xenophobia.

The Boxer Rising of a.d. 1900, like the sporadic outbreaks of Zealot-
ism in Japan during the years a.d. 1853-68, was directed in the first
place against a decadent indigenous regime whose dubious title to legiti¬
macy was now challenged on the score of its manifest incompetence to
resist the encroachments of Western intruders who were the rebels’ ulti¬
mate target. An incurable inability to carry out the Zealots’ anti-Western
requirements was the offence that cost the Manchu imperial regime in
China its life in a.d. 1911, as it had been the cause of the Tokugawa
Shogunatc’s downfall in Japan in a.d. 1867-8. The Manchu Dynasty’s
doom had been sealed by its supreme and unpardonable offence of
having owed its reprieve, eleven years back, to the bayonets of the alien
international expeditionary force that had raised the Boxers’ siege of the
Legation Quarter in Peking; and the execution done by the Western
sword with which the Boxers had perished 1 in a.d. 1900, and the T’aip’ing
before them in a.d. 1864, 2 like those militant Jewish followers of Thcudas
and Judas who had once ventured to try conclusions with the Romans, 3
did not deter a third generation of Chinese Zealots in a.d. 1925 from
rushing into a fresh campaign of militancy which, in the teeth of all the
forbidding precedents, was to justify itself by its success in bringing
about the progressive abolition of ‘the Unequal Treaties’:

Moreover, the ambivalence which we have found pervading all phases
and aspects of the Japanese psychological reaction to the impact of the
Modern West was discernible in the Chinese arena likewise in at least
two movements. We have just now classified the T’aip’ing as a Zealot
revolt against a semi-alien Manchu imperial regime which, in Zealot
Chinese eyes, had forfeited any mandate to which it might have been
able to claim title through its failure to prevent the unceremonious
pioneers of a wholly alien Western World from breaking their way into
the Middle Kingdom’s sacrosanct precincts by force of arms. But such
an account of the T’aip’ing would be misleadingly incomplete if we did
not go on to remind ourselves that the inspiration of its founder Hung
Hsiu-ch’uan’s mountain-moving faith had come, not from the Confucian
Classics, which he had studied without showing the ability required to
qualify as a littcratus, but from tracts compiled by a Chinese convert of
a Protestant Western Christian missionary; 4 and the Western manu¬
facture of the spring that thus released this Chinese prophet-pretender’s

1 Matt. xxvi. 52.

1 A Manchu regime whose old-fashioned troops had signally failed to suppress the
T’aip'ine had owed its salvation in this crisis to a new-model force organized and led for
it by a Western mercenary soldier who consequently came to be known among his
compatriots as 'Chinese Gordon'.

> Acts. v. 36-37- * See V. v. 107, n. 1.

ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 597

energies requires us to enter his name in the Herodian column of our
inventory as well.

This recourse to the device of double entry was also the only adequate
method of classifying the more recent phenomenon of Chinese Com¬
munism; for, while this movement, too, had an indisputable claim to a
place in the Zealot column on the score of its implacable enmity towards
its Herodian contemporary and rival the Kuomintang, the subtly per¬
vasive taint of Herodianism also betrayed itself in the war-gear of a
Chinese anti-Western movement that had borrowed the ideology of
Communism from a Russian armoury; for Russia was not herself the
artificer of the Marxian thunderbolt, but had imported this ideological
weapon for her own use from the forge of a nineteenth-century Western
hcresiarch before re-exporting it to China for employment on the local
anti-Western front in a ‘cold war’ that was then coming to be waged on
an oecumenical scale.

In the psychological reactions of the pre-Columbian civilizations in
the Americas to the appalling advent of militarily irresistible aggressors
from a previously quite unheard-of and all but undreamed-of alien
world overseas, the Zealot heroism of the Inca ‘die-hards’, who held out
in an Andean mountain-fastness for thirty years after the Empire of the
Four Quarters had fallen before the horse-hoofs and the fire-arms of
the Spanish conquistadores , 1 flared up again, more than three hundred
years later, in the insurrection of a pretender to the tragically inspiring
name of Tupac Amaru in a.d. 1780-3 ; 2 but this vein of Zealotism in an
overwhelmed Andean cosmos was balanced in the original Tupac
Amaru's generation, on the morrow of the conquest, by the Herodianism
of half-breed children of Spanish conquistadores and Inca mothers. The
work of the half-breed Jesuit Father Bias Valera perished in manuscript,
before publication, in the siege of Cadiz by the English in a.d. 1596, 3 but
the work of his fellow half-breed Garcilaso de la Vega 4 (vivebat a.d.
1540-1616) was preserved to be the principal repertory of the Incas’
traditions about themselves in the libraries of these Andean empire-
builders’ Western supplanters. This soldier-historian had gathered his
ancestral traditions in his Quichuan mother-tongue from the survivors
of the last generation of antediluvian Inca grandees before he left his
Andean fatherland for ever at the age of twenty to serve on European
battlefields as an officer in the Spanish Army; but he survived thirty
years of military service to set down on paper in Castilian at Cordova in
his riper years the oral information that he had garnered in Quichuan at
Cuzco in his boyhood.

This evanescent Herodianism of a handful of half-breeds belonging to
a single generation in the sixteenth century is a less impressive instance
of the Herodian psychological reaction in the Andean World than the
subsequent miracle of the adoption of the current Western Civilization
in a Catholic Christian medium by the Guarani transfrontier barbarians

» See V. vi. aij. * See I. i. 120. n. x.

3 See Baudin, L.: I'Empire Socialise des Inka (Paris 1928, Institut d’Ethnologie),
p. 12, n. 3.

* A note of Garcilaso de la Vega's career will be found ibid., p. 12.

598 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
in Paraguay en masse. In the Paraguayan ‘reductions’ the spell-binding
charm of the Jesuits’ Orphean music worked the magic of securing a
truce to the ferocity which these Western Christian culture-heroes’ tem¬
porarily docile Guarani converts, pupils, and proteges had displayed,
before this interlude, as barbarian invaders of the Andean World, and
which they were to display again as cannon-fodder in the international
and civil wars of the Latin-American successor-states of the Spanish and
Portuguese Empires. This summer of unwonted peace and prosperity
between two bouts of frantic militarism lasted in Paraguay for the best
part of two centuries (circa a.d. 1580-1773) and was terminated only by
the Spanish Crown’s wanton crime of liquidating an idyllic hicrocracy.'

When we turn our eyes from the Andes to Central America, we find
there an illustration of the Herodian reaction in the readiness with
which a subjugated indigenous peasantry in the Spanish Viceroyalty of
New Spain embraced a version of a Tridentinc Catholic Christianity in
Which the natives’ Castilian religious instructors discreetly overlooked
the infusion of a reassuring alloy of their converts’ pristine paganism.
On the northern fringes of the same Mexic World the antithetical ethos
of Zcalotism displayed itself in the gentle persistence with which an
indigenous religion and way of life were treasured by the Pueblo and
other agricultural sedentary communities that had been ceded by the
Republic of Mexico to the United States in a.d. 1848; while, still farther
afield, among the Nomadic hunting tribes of North America, the same
Zealot spirit gave birth to new indigenous religions 2 under the agonizing
ordeal of an assault by which these most unhappy of all American
victims of aggression from overseas were being deprived, not merely of
political freedom, but of the possibility of continuing to lead an ancestral
way of life that had depended on a freedom to range over their now
stolen hunting grounds. 3

In the psychological reactions in the Central American World we also
find examples of the phenomenon of ambivalence. The revolution that
broke out in Mexico in a.d. 1910 might look, on the surface, like a social
conflict in which the line of division between the combatant parties con¬
formed to the conventional Western pattern of the day; yet a more
penetrating eye would discern that these Mexican laymen, peasants, and
workers in revolt against prelates, landlords, and employers who were
largely of West European and North American provenance were also
Zealot champions of a submerged Mexic culture against the ascendancy
of an alien civilization that had originated in the Old World. In a neigh¬
bouring section of the same continent in an earlier generation the savage
military resistance offered to the encroachments of White Men from
overseas by Apaches, Comanches, and other Indian denizens of the
Great Plains who had learnt from their assailants the Eurasian art of

« For the work of the Jesuits in Paraguay, sec Cunninghame Graham, R. B.: A Van¬
ished Arcadia, 2nd ed. (London 1924, Hcincmann), and O’Neill, G.: Golden Years on
I he Paraguay (London 1934, Bums, Oates, & Waahbourne).

1 See V. v. 328-32.

3 The contrast in fithos between the Plains Indians and the Pueblos is brought out
by Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Culture (Cambridge, Mass. 193«. The Riverside Press),
pp. 78-95 • The resistance of the Plains Indians is examined on pp. 630-50, below.

ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 599

horsemanship was likewise impossible to describe adequately without
calling these fierce warriors both Zealots, in virtue of their recalcitrance
to their White executioners’ lethal designs, and Herodians, in virtue of
their receptivity in borrowing from their adversaries an imported ani¬
mate weapon which was providentially apt for use in a hitherto horseless
‘Centaurs’ paradise’.

In the psychological reactions of the Jewish fossil of an extinct Syriac
Civilization to an encompassing and oppressive Western Christendom
among which this Jewry was dispersed, we shall find a classical illustra¬
tion of Zealotism in the meticulous observance of the Mosaic Law by
orthodox Jews who had faithfully followed Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai’s
admonitions to seek in the practice of this social drill their palladium for
preserving their distinctive communal identity in diaspord; and in the
same field we shall also find a classical illustration of Herodianism in
the whole-heartedness and the virtuosity with which all the Jews in
the West—Ritualists, Liberals, and Zionists alike—participated in the
secular activities of the Western Gentile World on the economic plane.

In a Late Modern Western World in which the walls of the ghetto
had fallen at the sound of a Revolutionary French trumpet, a latter-
day Liberal School of Jews seized the opening thus offered to them
for carrying their Herodianism beyond the economic plane on to the
political and the personal. When once the pungent elixir of Rabbini¬
cal Judaism had been volatilized in the Jewish Liberal’s Late Modern
Western intellectual crucible to a degree of insipidity at which a Jewish
citizen of the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, or the United States
could be described as 'a Dutchman, Frenchman, Englishman, or Ameri¬
can of Jewish religion’ not less accurately than his Gentile fellow
Liberal and fellow countryman could be given the corresponding label
of a Dutchman or what-not of such-and-such a Christian denomination,
it became comparatively easy, in the intellectual and emotional environ¬
ment of an ex-Christian Liberal World, for latter-day Jewish Herodians
to carry the process of assimilation to the further stage of abandoning
even their formal membership in a Jewish community and intermarry¬
ing with neighbours and fellow citizens of Gentile origin. What sense
was there, for a Liberal’s rational mind, in a Mosaic ban that debarred
Jews from conmibium with Gentiles with whom all Jews in diaspori must
always practise commercium in order to earn their daily bread ?

The effort of breaking with traditional Jewish habit and prejudice
which was entailed in such a defiance of a Mosaic tabu on mixed mar¬
riages might come easiest when the parties could meet and mate on a
common ground of cx-Jewish and ex-Christian religious agnosticism;
but an ex-Jew who had gone that far would no longer find it very diffi¬
cult to pay a tribute to conventionality at a cheap rate by submitting to
the formality of a baptism that would purchase for him a nominal mem¬
bership in one of the less unfashionable of the Christian churches of the
day. The anti-clockwise pilgrim’s progress of the Jewish Herodian in a
Late Modern Western World had illustrated the facility with which 'one
thing leads to another’ by going to these lengths before an outraged
Moses was vindicated and avenged by a maniac Hitler who provided

600 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
himself with pariahs for penalization more Visigothico by routing out
these ‘non-Aryans’ from the Gentile communities into which they had
passed so adroitly, in order to thrust them back against their will into
their deliberately abandoned invidious traditional role of being ‘a pecu¬
liar people’.

At the time of writing on the morrow of a Second World War, both
the Herodian ‘non-Aryan’ and the Zealot Ritualist survivors of the
Jewish diaspora in the Western World had lost the lead in a Western
Jewry to a Zionist movement that differed from both these other dias-
poran reactions alike in displaying an ambivalent affinity with both of
them simultaneously. 1

The Zionists’ deliberate and enthusiastic recultivation of a distinc¬
tively separate Jewish consciousness stamped them with the authentic
hall-mark of Zealotism. Yet these Zionist Neo-Zealots were anathema
to diasporan devotees of the Ritualistic Zealot tradition inaugurated by
Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, in whose eyes the Zionists were guilty of
flagrant impiety in presuming to bring about on their own initiative a
physical return of the Jewish people to Palestine which it was God’s

f rerogative to accomplish at His own good time according to Agudath
srael’s hyper-orthodox belief. And, even when the Zionists had partially
attained their objective manu militari, the Jewish Ritualists’joy at having
lived to see the Mosaic Law reinstituted in a reconquered Erctz Israel
must have been damped by the observation—to which no sharp-sighted
lover of this Law could blind himself—that the Zionists had been moved
to re-enact the Torah by the same cynical motive of making religious
formalities serve secular purposes as had animated the ‘non-Aryan’
candidates for Christian baptism.

On the other hand, in the Assimilationist Jews’ estimation, the
Zionists’ Herodian loss of their ancestral Jewish faith was a common
experience that did not avail to atone for a Zealot vein in Zionism which,
in the Assimilationists’ eyes, was deplorably retrograde. The Assimila-
tionists could not bear the Zionists’ relapse into their common ancestors’
irrational Zealot belief that the Jews were ‘a peculiar people’. Yet an
orthodox Jewish polemical theologian, or even a neutral Gentile scien¬
tific observer, who chose to charge the Zionists with being guilty of the
same crime of ‘Assimilationism’ as those avowed Assimilationists who
gloried in the name, would not have found it difficult to secure a con¬
viction.

The truth was that, while the professed Assimilationists were seeking
to assimilate themselves individually to their individual Gentile neigh¬
bours, the Zionists were unavowcdly aiming at the same objective of
assimilation in the more radical form of a corporate transformation of
the Jewish community into the likeness of ‘all the nations’ 2 of a Western or
Westernizing World in which a latter-day Jewry found itself living. The
Zionist prisoner in the dock would, no doubt, protest that his aim, in part¬
ing company with the non-violent Jewish Zealots of Rabbi Johanan ben
Zakkai’s school, was not to arrive by a better alternative road at the goal
of assimilation which was his Liberal Jewish contemporary’s Herodian

1 See II. iL 252-4. 2 x Sam. viii. 5 and 20.

ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 601

objective, but was, on the contrary*, to reinvigorate a tame non-violent
rendering of the theme of Jewish Zcalotism by reverting to the militancy
of those Theudases and Judases who had come so promisingly near to
success in the glorious years a.d. 66-70, 115-17, and 132-5. 1 But, even
if this hypothetical plea of our imaginary Zionist defendant had not been
open in a.d. 1952 to being impugned by a damningly odious comparison
of it with the speculations of some irreclaimable contemporary German
chauvinist on Germany’s chances in a third world war, it would have
been confuted by the evidence of the historic sicarii themselves, if Jewish
Zealots of the classical period could have been raised from the dead to
be placed in the witness-box by the counsel for the prosecution.

We may be sure that these inexpugnably authoritative witnesses, so
far from being grateful to the Zionist in the dock for having cited them
as his revered exemplars, would have scornfully dissociated themselves
from him after pointing out to the Court that the Zionist’s ideology' did
not vindicate but bewrayed him. In basing the Jewish people’s title to
the soil of Eretz Israel on the physical ground that they were a master
race in virtue of having Abraham for their father, 1 the Zionist was un¬
wittingly testifying that he had been ensnared by the lure of a post-
Modcrn Western Gentile Racialism in which a Late Modern Western
Gentile Nationalism had denounced itself, through the self-exposure of
a sclf-caricature, as being the naked Neo-Paganism that it was. In pur¬
suit of this inveterate Gentile idolatry in the particularly sinister form of
Man’s self-worship of a human herd, the Zionist Jewish addict to a
pagan cult of ‘blood and soil’ had abandoned his fathers’ faith that the
Jews were a chosen people in virtue of God’s grace in having con¬
descended to make a covenant with Abraham and his seed in which the
Lord’s choice of Israel was conditional upon Israel’s continuing to obey
the Lord’s commandments. In thus leaving God’s will and Israel’s
conduct out of his reckoning, the Zionist was parting with the spiritual
ground which was the only sure basis for the Jews’ title to the soil of
the Holy Land just because this orthodox version of the traditional
Jewish faith compelled the faithful who adhered to it to recognize, with
fear and trembling, that their privilege was contingent upon their keep¬
ing faith with their Maker and Chooser. What surer way of losing
Jewry’s title could the Zionists have devised than to deviate, in the
blindness of a pagan hybris, into the delusion that a revocable grant
from Almighty God was an inalienable birthright automatically trans¬
mitted through the physical medium of an Abrahamic blood-stream?

It will be seen that Zionism betrayed its ambivalence by laying itself
open to simultaneous charges of Iferodianism and Zealotism which,
unfortunately for the Zionists, did not cancel one another out.

The psychological reactions in the Islamic World to the aggression of
a Late Modern Western Civilization were strikingly reminiscent of the
reactions to Hellenic aggression in Jewry during the two centuries
ending in a.d. 135.

The insurrections of Jewish militant fanatics embattled on the desert
fringes of Palestine against Idumacan tctrarchs and Roman procurators

» See V. v. 68. * Matt. iii. 9.

6oz AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

who had been invested by Caesar with the stewardship of the former
dominions of Herod the Great had their counterpart in the fanatical
outbreaks of the Wahhabi, IdrlsI, Mahdist, and Sanusi Muslim puritans 1
who sallied out of their fastnesses in the Najd, ‘Asir, Kordofan, and the
desert hinterland of Cyrenaica on the forlorn hope of overthrowing an
Ottoman regime which, in their censorious eyes, had proved itself un¬
worthy of its pretension to be the heir of the Caliphate. As these Islamic
Zealots saw it, the Padishah had aggravated a heinous first ofFence of
losing the military and political initiative to his infidel Western adver¬
saries by committing the unpardonable second ofFence of allowing the
Ottoman body politic to become a channel for the infection of the heart
of Dar-al-Islam with the triumphant infidel’s contaminating influence.
In this light, nineteenth-century Ottoman sultans and pashas cut the
same odious figure as the Herods and Pilates had once cut in the sight
of leaders of a Zealot Jewish resistance movement; and the lamentable
spectacle of the Theudases and Judases falling suicidally upon devour¬
ing Roman swords was duly reproduced in the execution done by
Modern Western weapons when the Najdl Wahhabis were smitten by
Ibrahim Pasha, the Sudanese Mahdists by Kitchener, 2 the Libyan
Sanusls by Graziani, 3 and the MaghribI patriot leaders, an ‘Abd-al-
Q§dir in Algeria and an ‘Abd-al-Karlm in the Moroccan Rif, 4 by
Bugcaud 5 and by Boichut. Only the Pathan highlanders 6 in an East
Iranian no-man’s-land between a now independent Pakistan and a still
independent Afghanistan had succeeded, down to the time of writing,
in emulating in a latter-day D 5 r-al-Islam the Arsacids’ and Sasanids’
feat of thwarting all Roman attempts to recapture for Hellenism an ‘Iraq
and a Western Iran that Arsacid arms had salvaged for Zoroastrianism
from the Hellenic domination of the Romans’ Seleucid predecessors.

These latter-day Islamic reproductions of Zealot Jewish prototypes
were balanced, in the same chapter of Islamic history, by avatars of the
Herodians’ eponymous Idumaean hero, the great son of Antipater him¬
self, in the titanic Herodian figures of a Mehmcd ‘All Pasha (thrown into
relief by his reactionary grandson and successor ‘Abbas I), a Sultan
Mahmud II, and a Ghazi Mustafa Kcmal Ataturk who, in his own life¬
time, was successfully imitated in Persia by a Riza Shah Pahlawi and
was unsuccessfully parodied in Afghanistan by an Am 3 nallah; 7 and we
have already observed that Riza Shah’s and Ataturk’s radical Herodian
reforms 8 had been anticipated by an abortive Westernizing revolution
in Persia in a.d. 1906 and in Turkey in a.d. 1908. 9

I Sec V. V. 294-5 and 324, and V. vi. 227.

» Sec Theobald, A. B.: The Mahdiya, A History of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1881-
189$ (London 1951, Longmans, Green); Trimingham, J. S.: Islam in the Sudan (London
1949, Oxford University Press).

J An account of the warfare in Libya between the Sanusis and the Italians during
the years a.d. 1911-32 will be found in Evans-Pritchard, E. E.: The Sanusi of Cyrenaica
(Oxford 1949, University Press), chaps. 5-7. « See V. vi. 227.

J 'Abd-al-Qidir’s surrender was actually received by Bugeaud’s lieutenant Lamo-
riciire.

• Sec V. v. 30578 and 332-3, »nd V. vi. 228. 7 See V. v. 333.

* The imposition of Western dress in Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan has been
noticed in V. vi. 102-3, and the imposition of the Latin Alphabet in Turkey ibid., on
pp - " 2_, 3 -

« The temporarily successful constitutionalist revolution in Turkey in a.d. 1908 was,

ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 603

On the other hand the Islamic Society may be credited with originality
in having given birth to two nobly tragic martyrs to Herodianism in the
persons of an imaginatively prescient Sultan Selim III and a bene¬
ficently efficient Midhat Pasha, while the doubtful honour of producing
such oddly compounded monsters as Zealot-drones, for which it might
be hard to find a precedent in Syriac history, was shared by the Islamic
Society with the Russian branch of Orthodox Christendom, where the
massacre of the Janissaries by Selim Ill’s cousin and avenger Mahmud
II, and the massacre of the Mamluks by Mehmcd ‘All, had been antici¬
pated in the massacre of the Streltsy by Peter the Great.

There was, however, a residual tinge of Zealotism even in Mehmcd
‘Ali’s aggressively Herodian Sthos; 1 and in the writer’s day the Islamic
World had produced an unmistakably ambivalent culture-hero in the
kingly person of an ‘Abd-al‘Azi2 b.‘Abd-ar-Rahman Al Sa'ud, 2 the
restorer of the fortunes of his house and sect who proved himself a suc¬
cessor of his Wahhabi Zealot forebears when he purged the Haramayn
in the Hijaz of the taint of idolatrous corruption after his conquest and
annexation of the Islamic Holy Land, but went on to prove himself also a
successor of those same primitive Wahhabi Zealots’ Herodian Ottoman
bugbears when he set himself to consolidate the political independence
of a salvaged Arabia by coaxing his turbulent and fanatical tribesmen to
exchange the nomadic shepherd’s leisure for the labours of a sedentary
husbandry in oases whose productivity Ibn Sa'ud did not hesitate to
multiply by resorting to the unhallowed Western technique of boring
artesian wells. When the Badu had thus been broken in to an Herodian
revolution in their way of life, it was less difficult for their Janus-faced
patriarch to provide himself with the financial sinews of war or welfare
by earning royalties from leases granted, with his now semi-domesti¬
cated Badawi subjects’ acquiescence, to American entrepreneurs who
were thirsting to tap the liquid mineral wealth of an Arabian desert’s
subsoil by probing it, not now for water, but for oil.

In the reaction to the West in the Hindu World the Islamic Zealotism
of Wahhabi, IdrlsI, Mahdist, and Sanusi puritans had its psychological
counterpart in a Zealot revival of an orgiastic Kali-worship and recul¬
tivation of a desiccated Vedic lore, while the Brahmans’ Zealot-minded
anxiety to elude the ritual contamination that they would have incurred
through eating and drinking in the company of their British ‘fellow

as we have seen, the work of a ‘New 'Osmanli' movement which had made its first
abortive attempt to turn the Ottoman Empire into a parliamentary constitutional state
alia Franca as early as the third quarter of the nineteenth century. A recent Western
student of this episode of Ottoman history had summed up his appreciation of the policy
of NSmyq Kem 41 , one of the leading 'New ‘Osmanli’ publicists of the pioneer generation,
by putting it that ‘his aim was to regenerate the state by borrowing from the West the
means to oppose to the West a stronger and more united nation’ (Davison, R. H,:
Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1S56-1876 (thesis submitted to Harvard University for
the degree of Ph.D., xst April, 1942), p. 241 of the typescript copy in Harvard Univer¬
sity Library, quoted here by permission). This sentence puts in a nutshell the objective
that is the common goal of all Hcrodians.

1 In his Report on Egypt ar.d Candia of the 27th March, 1839 (London 1840, Clowes),

C 30, Sir John Bowring records the Egyptians’ confident belief that they had now
imt enough from their Frank instructors in Western technique to be able to afford to
dispense with their costly services—though, in Bowring’s own opinion, experience had
proved the contrary (cp. ibid., pp. 48 and 151). 2 See V. v. 333-4.

6o 4 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
Aryans’* was amusingly reminiscent of the Pharisees’ similar embarrass¬
ments in their unavoidable contacts with their uncircumcized Roman
lords and masters. Yet these ritualistic scruples did not deter Brahmans
from deliberately setting foot within an unclean British lion’s den in
order to serve the new alien rulers of India as administrators, in the
footsteps of those Brahmans of earlier generations who had served the
now fallen Muslim predecessors of the British in the same capacity. The
British empire-builders’ Brahman coadjutors equipped themselves for
this Herodian profession of their choice by learning English 2 with the
same industry and virtuosity that their fathers had shown in learning
Persian. 3

In this post-Mughal phase of the Hindu Society’s experience of alien
political domination, Brahmans, as well as Kshatriyas, extended the
breadth of their front on their Herodian line of march by also taking
service in the professional armies, on a Western model, that were raised,
in and after the later decades of the eighteenth century, by a variegated
pack of Hindu, Muslim, and Western adventurers who were now con¬
tending with one another in a competition to carve successor-states out
of the carcass of a defunct Timurid Mughal Empire. When a combina¬
tion of two complementary reductive processes—destruction and absorp¬
tion—had duly reduced these inchoate Westernizing military forces on
Indian ground first to the two surviving military establishments of a
British East India Company and a Sikh war-lord Ranjit Singh, and finally
to one sole surviving British Indian Army, as a result of a hundred years
of costly experimentation in ‘the survival of the fittest’, this Western-
organized, Western-trained, and Western-officered Indian military
machine fed by voluntary enlistment kept open a wide vent for Hindu
Herodian proclivities—at first mainly among the so-called ‘martial races’
of the North-West, 4 but eventually also among Hindus of all castes and
quarters whom a Western education had qualified and inspired to be¬
come candidates for officer-cadetships in an Indian Army when the cadre
of officers was deliberately and rapidly ‘Indianized’ in the last phase of
the British regime. The strength and volume of a Hindu Herodian
movement that had been gathering momentum for the best part of two
hundred years, as its triple stream swept forward down a military, an

! The mirage of a common physical stock to which latter-day Hindus and latter-day
Europeans alike could trace back their descent had been conjured up by the un¬
warranted inference that the existence of 'an Aryan race’ was implied in the authentic
discovery of an Urtpraeht from which all the latter-day languages of an ‘Indo-European’
family were genuinely derived. In India under a British Raj, this mistaken physiological
induction from a correct linguistic premiss was not taken sufficiently seriously to move
either the Brahman to sit at tabic with the Englishman or the Englishman to elect the
Brahman to membership in his club. It was left for the Nazi fellow countrymen of Bopp
to exploit the Aryan racial myth as an instrument of torture for use in their persecution
of the Jews long after it had become manifest to scholars that there was little or no corre¬
spondence between the family-trees of languages and the genealogies of races. Such a
mischievous use does not appear ever to have been made of the analogous legend of a
common origin of the Spartans and the Jews that was invented to serve current political
purposes in the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic history'.

J See V. v. 507.

J The Brahmans’ linguistic prowess was the more praiseworthy inasmuch as most of
them remained unaware that these graceless alien tongues which they were mastering
from a utilitarian motive were akin to the sacred Sanskrit in which they themselves were
zealous litterati. 4 See II. ii. 128, n. 1.

ZEALOTISM AND HEROD IAN ISM 605

administrative, and also an industrial channel, was demonstrated in and
after the summer of a.d. 1947, when the management of an Indian
Union was successfully taken over from British hands by an efficient
working party of Hindu statesmen, staff officers, and business men.

In previous contexts attention has been drawn to the ambivalence of
the reaction of a Mahatma Gandhi whose conduct of his Zealot cam¬
paign for a radical severance of the economic threads implicating the
Hindu Society in a Western way of life revealed this Hindu Janus’s
Hcrodian counter-face in both the Quaker-minded gentleness and the
publicity-conscious efficiency with which the Gandhian political strategy
of non-violent non-co-operation was put into action. In this place we
have only to make the one further observation that a similar ambivalence
revealed itself in the ethos of a would-be Zealot Arya Samaj, 1 which,
though founded for the purpose of providing a corrective to the Brahmo
Sam 3 j’s out-and-out Herodianism, 2 was itself open to the damaging
charge that it had derived its own anti-Hcrodian inspiration from an
Herodian sensitiveness to the exotic influence of a Western Romantic
Movement.

The psychological reaction to the impact of the Modern West in the
main body of Orthodox Christendom has come to our notice in the sullen
retreat of a Zealotism that had still been murderously militant when, in
a.d. 1638, it had compassed Cyril Loukaris' death in retribution for his
Herodian crime of Calvinism. Thereafter, the Greek Orthodox hierarchy
still showed their teeth in occasional rear-guard actions. Their frustra¬
tion of Evyenios Voulgharis’ eighteenth-century pioneer educational work
advertised their disapproval of Herodianism even when this obnoxious
outlook was confined to the intellectual plane, while their subsequent
obstruction of the educational activities of nineteenth-century American
Protestant missionaries betrayed a perhaps less unreasonable suspicion
that in this case an educational programme might have the conversion
of souls as its covert ulterior object. Their last losing battle in a Zealot
cause was fought in opposition to the plans adopted by an Herodian-
minded post-Mahmudian Ottoman Porte for reforming the constitution
of the Millet-i-Rum by giving the laity as well as the clergy a place on its
governing body and by introducing into its organization the latter-day
Western constitutional devices of representative government by election
and of parliamentary control over public finance.

At the same time there was also an Herodian vein in the cultural evolu¬
tion of an Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christian oligarchy in this age; for,
in the course of two hundred years ending in the nineteenth-century last
stands of clerical Greek ‘die-hards’, a ring of Phanariot Greek families 3
had secured something like a monopoly of the patronage in the making
of appointments to the higher posts in the Orthodox ecclesiastical hier¬
archy throughout the Ottoman dominions thanks to the wealth and power
which these Phanariots had won for themselves by entering the Otto¬
man public service under unprecedentedly favourable new conditions
that had been offered to them since the middle of the seventeenth cen¬
tury; and the professional asset which had purchased for the Phanariots

» Sec V. vi. 94. * See V. v. 106. > See II. ii. 222-8.

606 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
from their Ottoman masters these unwontedly attractive terms of em¬
ployment had been the Hcrodian familiarity with the languages, man¬
ners, and customs of a contemporary schismatic Western Christendom
which these Greek Orthodox Christian Brahmans had not disdained to
acquire for the sake of the increasingly lucrative profits that they found
themselves able to earn by serving as middlemen in the commerce
between an Ottoman World and the Occidental ‘Children of Hagar’.
When these enterprising seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century
Greek Orthodox Christian merchants had once set their feet on this
Herodian Broadway, 1 it was not surprising that the rank-and-file of a
nineteenth-century Ottoman Millet-i-Rum should have followed the
Phanariots’ lead to Broadway’s terminus by indulging in the more
hazardous Hcrodian conceit of sorting themselves out, in imitation of
the Western fashion of the day, into a patchwork of territorially segre¬
gated linguistically homogeneous sovereign national states.

In the Russian branch of Orthodox Christendom the psychological
reactions to the impact of the Modern West surpassed the contemporary
reactions in the main body of Orthodox Christendom in the lengths to
which they ran in both directions. In the irreligiously prophetic figure
of Peter the Great, 2 Russia produced the archetype of all the high¬
handed autocrats who were to impose their Herodianism ‘from above
downwards’ on their fellow creatures in other societies that were like¬
wise confronted with a ubiquitous and inescapable ‘Western Question’,
while in the opposite swing of her psychological pendulum the same
Russia reproduced Jewry’s uncompromising Pharisees in her Old
Believers 3 and Jewry’s desperate Theudases and Judases in her Cossack

» Malt. vii. 13.

* Sec III. iii. 278-83. Pcler’s Hcrodian figure cast its Zealot shadow in the shape of
his son, heir, opponent, and victim, Alexei.

J See V. vi. 120-1. Some two hundred different sects of dissenters (raikolniki) were
generated (see Metric, C.: Die Europdisierung Russlands im 18. Jahrhunderte (Gotha 1913,
Perthes), pp. 161-72) in the last chapter of the pre-Petrine phase of Russian history by
the liturgical reforms of the Romaicixing Patriarch of Moscow, Nikfln ( pontifical!
tnunere ]ungebatur a.d. 1652-58 de facto and 1652-66 de jure). Though the issue over
which they had parted company with the officially Orthodox Russian Church of the day
was their indignation at an assimilation of current Russian liturgical practice, not to a
schismatic Western Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, but to the contemporary
Greek version of Russia’s own cherished Orthodoxy, many of the dissenting Russian
sects eventually also took a Wahhabi-like stand against Western innovations; and their
Zealot puritamsm was apt to fasten upon such spiritually neutral ‘Yankee notions’ as
the cultivation of the Italian style of church music and religious painting, the smoking
of tobacco, the drinking of tea, and the wearing of Western clothes (ibid., p. 162;
Brilckner, A.: Peter der Groste (Berlin 1879. Grotc), p.281). This Francophobia was com¬
mon ground between the dissenters and their Nikonitc bugbears (sec BrQckner, op. cit.,
pp. 96 and 212), and it was particularly violently excited by Western innovations in dress
(see the present Study, III. iii. 283, n. 1, and V. vi. 102)—even when these innovations
were recognized as being merely w-hat they were, and did not give rise to such horrifying
misapprehensions as the mistaking of wig-stands for idols which led, at Astrakhan in
a.d. 1705, to an armed insurrection in which the unfortunate bewigged Western officers
in Tsar Peter’s garrison there were massacred (see Brilckner, op. cit., pp. 287 and 289;
Sumner, B. H.: Peter the. Great and the Emergence of Ruitia (London 1950, English
Universities Press), p. 66). This detestation of Western dress was shared with the dis¬
senters by their own detested adversaries the patriarchs. The wearing of Western
clothes was forbidden by Nik6n himself (Brilckner, op. cit., p. 19), and this ban of
Nikfin’s was repeated by the Patriarch Joachim {fungebatur a.D. 1674-90) in a testament
(redactum a.d. 1690) in which he also called for the rasing of all churches erected by
non-Orthodox Christians on Russian soil as a practical way of acting on his general
warning against ‘Latins, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Tatars’ (Brilckner, op. cit., p. 97).

ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 607

militant Zealots Stenka Razin and Pugachev, 1 whose ‘die-hard’ deaths
put to shame Peter’s drone-like Zealot victims the Streltsy.

Even a pre-Petrine Imperial Government that had already taken the
first steps to equip itself with Western armaments proved able to inflict
on Razin (erupit a.d. 1667-71) the fate that was to overtake Pugachev,
when he dared to measure his strength against the post-Petrine army of
the Empress Catherine, and was likewise to overtake the Wahhabis when
they provoked the Ottoman punitive expedition that was eventually
launched against them by Mehmcd ‘All. Yet the Petrine regime of
Catherine and her successors, whose flagrant Herodianism stamped
them in the Old Believers’ eyes with so indubitable a mark of the Beast
as to certify their satanic archigetis Peter’s identity with Antichrist, 2
harboured a lingering residue of Zealotism which betrayed itself in this
regime’s ecclesiastical policy towards the Uniatc element in the Ukrainian
and White Russian population that was reunited with a still aggressively
‘holy’ Muscovite Russia as a result of the three successive partitions of
Poland-Lithuania between the years a.d. 1772 and a.d. 1795. Though in
theory the ecclesiastical allegiance of their new subjects ought to have
been a matter of studied indifference to an Occidentally enlightened
late-eighteenth-century Russian Imperial Government, the statesmen
at St. Petersburg nevertheless departed from their professed principle of
religious toleration by abusing their political power in compelling the
Orthodox Church’s Ukrainian and White Russian Uniate lost sheep to
return to Orthodoxy by entering a Muscovite ecclesiastical fold—for all
the world as if these Voltairian martinets were not quite incredulous of
the Orthodox superstition that an ecclesiastical association with the
schismatic Western Church of Rome was a murrain from which these
infected stragglers from the flock must be decontaminated by being re-
dipped in Orthodoxy’s sterilizing chrism.

In our gallery of Janus-faced heads, we have long since observed that
Lenin’s bust has no rival except Gandhi’s for the distinction of being
labelled as the most perfect specimen'in the collection. In the vehemence
of their anti-Western Zealotism, even the fifteenth-century Russian
Orthodox Christian prelates who led the fanatical Orthodox opposition
against the Union of Florence were surpassed by the twentieth-century
Russian Communist opponents of a secularist Liberalism which had
come to be the prevalent Western ideology of the age; yet the Bolsheviks’
Zealot indictment of a contemporary Western way of life was uttered in
the name of a Western-made Marxian ideology in obedience to which
the Bolsheviks subjected Russia to an Herodian regimen that made Anti¬
christ Peter’s Herodianism seem mild by comparison when the Russian
soil whose surface Peter’s horse-drawn iron-shod plough had turned
was cloven to its depths by Stalin’s power-driven adamantine blade. In
this place we have only to add that the nineteenth-century Russian
Slavophils had anticipated the Bolsheviks in their ambivalence by draw¬
ing their inspiration for a would-be Zealot criticism of the current

r See V. v. 104 and V. vi. 227.

3 See BrUckner, A.: Peter der Crone (Berlin 1879, Grote), pp. 274-0; Sumner, B. H.:
Peter the Great and the Emergence of Rusiia (London 1950, English Universities Press),
pp. 65-66.

608 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
Western way of life from an Herodian acquaintance with a Western
Romantic Movement which was likewise to inspire the Zealot-meant
gestures of a Hindu Arya Samaj.

A no less equivocal interplay of Zealot and Herodian motifs accounts
for the fineness of the water of those pearls of literary art that were
secreted in a nineteenth-century Russia’s morbidly Westernizing body
social. The elusive riddle of an Herodian-Zealot Russian literature holds
a Western reader fascinated as he finds himself sinking below its seem-
ngly familiar aesthetic surface into the disquietingly alien underworld
of its spiritual depths; and this magic is no monopoly of 'the inspired
dog’ Dostoyevski’s mantic genius. It also animates the rarefied atmo¬
sphere and subdued colours of the exquisite psychological landscapes
painted by the naturalized Parisian Turgeniyev. We feel it as we admire
the masterly portraiture with which, in the character of Bazarov, he
creates the Janus-faced archetype of the Bolshevik’s forerunner the
Nihilist.'

Our tale of Zealots and Herodians would still be incomplete if we
neglected to round up a few stray goats and sheep from Cain’s and
Abel’s meeting-ground on the fringes of the Great Eurasian Steppe. An
Herodianism that cost the crypto-Hellenist Scythian Nomad prince
Scyles his life at his Zealot tribesmen’s hands in the fifth century b.c. 1
was practised with impunity in the same Great Western Bay of the
Steppe in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era by overt converts
to Orthodox Christianity among the Lamaistic Mahayanian Calmuck
Nomad subjects of a Petrine Russian Empire, 3 and likewise by the
Sinomane prince of ‘Wei’ Hiao Wen-ti (regnabat a.d. 490-9), though
this aggressive Herodian autocrat asked for trouble by going out of his
way to impose his policy of Sinification upon his ci-devant Nomad To
Pa fellow tribesmen in the successor-state which his and their barbarian
forebears had carved out for themselves from a defunct Sinic universal
state’s carcass. 4 Conversely, we find the lure of the Nomadic life evoking
an Herodian response in the heart of an Hellenic representative of the
Sedentary World in the fifth century of the Christian Era and in the
hearts of Chinese representatives of the same world in the seventeenth
century. The renegade Greek captive who had transformed himself into
a Hun warrior by the time when he ran into the Constantinopolitan
envoy Priscus in Attila’s camp was matched, as we have seen, 5 by
Chinese settlers who transformed themselves into Manchu ‘bannermcn’
in Southern Manchuria. In the gamut of the husbandman’s and business
man’s psychological reactions to the impact of Eurasian shepherd-kings,
these two instances of a thorough-going Scythophil Herodianism have
their antitheses in two outbreaks of a Scythophobe Zealotism that went
to no less extreme lengths. The Zealot reaction which threw the Mongols
out of a conquered China in the fourteenth century of the Christian Era 6

' The ‘Nihilism’ which in Russia was a premonitory symptom of the characteristic
malady of an intelligentsia has been noticed in V. v. 157. A sensitive appreciation of this
phenomenon will be found in Wcidli, W.: La Rustic Abtente el Prtscnle (Paris 1949,
Gallimard), ftp. 1x9-21.

1 See II. ii. 372, n. 3; III. iii, 28:. n. 2, and 429. n. ». 1 See III. iii. 420. n. 1.

4 See V. v. 47 T- 8 - s In V. v. 409-10. 4 See V. v. 348-51.

ZEALOTISM AND HEROD IAN ISM 609

had been anticipated in the sixteenth century b.c. by a Zealot reaction
of a no less demonic vehemence which had thrown the Hyksos out of a
conquered Lower Egypt. 1

These antithetical ‘Zealot’ and ‘Hcrodian’ types of psychological re¬
action which we have found declaring themselves so conspicuously in
encounters between contemporary representatives of different civiliza¬
tions may also be expected, in virtue of the psychic uniformity of Human
Nature, to be discernible and identifiable in other encounters in which
the parties represent, not different civilizations, but merely different
communities within a single world, or different individuals within a
single community; and, before we bring this survey to a close, it may be
as well to put this a priori expectation to at least one empirical test.

After the schism between the Catholic core of a Western Christendom
and the Protestant flake that split off from it in the Early Modern chapter
of Western his tor}', there were characteristic manifestations of both
Zealotism and Hcrodianism in the psychological reactions of the Catholic
party to this Western family quarrel.

Wc can trace the Zealot vein in the ecclesiastical sphere in a cult of
Papal autocracy, as an end in itself, which was inaugurated at the Council
of Constance (sedebat a.d. 1414-18) by Pope Martin V 2 and was carried
to its climax at the Vatican Council {sedebat a.d. 1869-70) by Pope Pius
IX. 3 The same rise of emotional temperature in a Zealot furnace can be
read on the gauge of ecclesiastical discipline in the difference between
the relentless severity of a Spanish Inquisition and the relative mildness
with which the repression of heresy had been conducted by the Roman
Church before the Spanish Inquisition had come to dominate this field
of Catholic action, while, in the intellectual field, we can observe a com¬
parable difference between the Vatican’s Herodian open-mindedness
towards a fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance of Hellenism and the
obscurantism of its resistance to a seventeenth-century indigenous
Western scientific revolution. 4 On the political plane, too, this Zealot
vein in the Modern Western Catholic Christian reaction to the challenge
of Protestantism declared itself in the Spanish Crown’s attempt to insu¬
late its Empire of the Indies by immuring this hermit kingdom behind
a wooden wall of Castilian sea-power.

On the other hand we see Hcrodianism asserting itself in a Late
Modern Catholic social environment in the tacit relaxation, in an eigh¬
teenth-century Italy, of the seventeenth-century Papal ban on an em¬
pirical study of Physical Science without regard for the authority of
Holy Church’s doctor of secular theology, Saint Aristotle, while, in a
France where Protestantism had been suppressed by Counter-Reforma¬
tory zeal, we see an Herodian crypto-Protestant-mindcdness reasserting
itself in the successive guises of an abortive Augustinian Jansenism and
of a triumphant rationalist agnosticism which followed up its conquest
of France by eventually conquering all the Catholic as well as Protestant

« See V. v. 351-2. # * See IV. iv. 573-4- 2 See IV. Iv. 638.

* This scientific revolution was not only a new departure; it was a move in a different
direction from that of the foregoing Renaissance of Hellenic culture (see the passage
quoted from Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modem Wtslem Science, 1300-1800,
in X. ix. 67-68).

B 28®8.vni

610 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
provinces of a Late Modern Western World. 1 In a French Revolution
in which the ideas of the eighteenth-century French rationalist philo¬
sophers went into action on the political plane, a ci-devant Catholic
France adopted from her ci-devant Protestant neighbours, Great Britain
and the United States, the modernized Medieval Western institution of
a parliamentary national state; and, in this elegantly rounded French
version, 2 an unattractively angular Anglo-Saxon political attitude was
eventually adopted—at least in outward show—even by such old-
fashioned Catholic countries as Spain, Portugal, the Latin-American
successor-states of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, and a glcich-
geschaltet Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

The Zealot vein in the Catholic reaction to the eruption of Protestant¬
ism in the Modern Western World had its counterpart in the contem¬
porary Zealotism of the Safawis’ Qyzylbash devotees 3 whose swords
achieved the trowel’s work of building a new city of refuge, in the heart
of an encompassing and indignant Sunni Iranic Muslim World, for a
long repressed and scattered Shi'ah, while the antithetical Hcrodian vein
can be detected in Nadir Shah’s unsuccessful attempt 4 to redivert a
latter-day Shi'i Persia into the Sunnah’s beaten track.

A Meeting of Extremes

If we now proceed to take stock of the impressions left on our minds
by the spectacle that we have just been watching, we may find that these
impressions are confused and that our minds are correspondingly be¬
wildered. As we took the salute from the mixed force under review, the
Zealot and the Herodian components of these motley troops both made
a parade, as they presented arms in passing the saluting point, of the
distinguishing marks blazoned on their respective accoutrements. In the
conspicuousness of these badges and the emphasis of these gestures
alike, they were insisting with one accord upon their diversity from one
another; yet this unanimous assertion of theirs was being contradicted
all the time by the evidence of our own observant eyes; for the most
striking of all the impressions made upon us was our observation—as
frequently repeated as it was perpetually surprising—that the classical
examples of either one of the two types turned out, as often as not, to be
also classical examples of the other type of soldier under arms for the
defence of an assaulted society.

The list of these Janus-figures that we have been jotting down so
assiduously turns out, on inspection, to be a veritable roll of celebrities.
It includes King Mithradates Eupator; the Sicel patriot Ducetius; the
Sheykh Bedr-ed-Dln of Simav; Guru Nanak the founder of the Sikh
Church (who had a likewise Janus-faced forerunner in the poet-prophet
Kablr); 5 all the Japanese statesmen who had been wrestling with the

1 Sec X. ix. 304-5.

. 2 Th c of France in Late Modem Western history as an interpreter of English
ideas which were peptonized by being ’processed’ in a French mill has been noticed in
III. m. 369-71: IV. iv. 2oo, n. 1; and on p. 517, above.

3 See I. i. 366-7 and V. v. 661-5.

* See IV. iv. 231; V. v. 106, 537, and 668.

See I. i. 399.

ZEALOTISM AND HE ROD I AN ISM 611

Western Question for the past four hundred years; Hung Hsiu-ch’uan,
the father of the T’aip’ing movement in a nineteenth-century China,
and the twentieth-century Chinese apostles of Communism; the authors
of the revolution in Mexico that broke out in a.d. 1910; 'the Horse
Indians’ on the Great Plains of North America; the Zionists; King
‘Abd-al-'Aziz Al Sa'ud; the Arya Samaj; Mahatma Gandhi; the Slavo¬
phils; the Bolsheviks; and the creators of a nineteenth-century Russian
literature. This dubious array of caprine Zealot sheep and ovine Hero-
dian goats may well make us sceptical of the authenticity of either of the
two soi-disant diverse breeds that are both alike represented in the am¬
biguous physiognomy of each of these Protean creatures; and we may
be moved to ask: Then were those contradictory-sounding Zealot and
Hcrodian slogans ‘Antichrist!’ and ‘Die-hard!’ insincerely rhetorical
exclamations ? And was that dumb-show of mutual antipathy and opposi¬
tion a sly piece of play-acting in which the actors were in collusion to
deceive us?

Our Zealot and Hcrodian demonstrators’ now suspect sincerity can
hardly be vindicated unless the alleged antithesis between their two
ideologies, which both schools unanimously call upon us to recognize,
proves to be guaranteed by some objective distinguishing mark in the
nature of a finger-print or a shibboleth; but none of the marks borne by
the representatives of cither party will prove, on examination, to be
either party’s distinctive livery.

There is, for example, a distinction, empirically traceable in our fore¬
going survey, between movements from above downwards and move¬
ments from below upwards; and, if we were to make our first test of this
possible differentia between Zealots and Herodians by applying it to the
classic case that we have taken as our prototype, a first glance at the rela¬
tions between Herod the Great and the Jewish Zealots of his day might
tempt us to jump to the conclusion that Herodianism could be dis¬
tinguished from Zealotism as a policy imposed from above downwards
on a passion surging up from below.

This criterion might seem accurately to distinguish a common charac¬
teristic of Herod and his forerunner Joshua-Jason from a common
characteristic of the Maccabees and the Pharisees. It might also appear
to hold good as between Herod’s Hellenizing patrician contemporaries
and counterparts in the Philistine and Phoenician city-states and their
anti-Hellenic kinsmen the insurgent Syrian slaves in Sicily; and, again,
as between an insurgent Egyptian peasantry and the Egyptian notables
in the mStropoleis of the nomes who proclaimed themselves philhellenes
by enrolling themselves as gymnasiasts. A latter-day series of anti-
Hellenic Zealot movements flying religious colours—a Nestorian and a
Monophysite Christianity and a more militantly Zealot Islam—all also
duly respond to our test by patently revealing themselves to be erup¬
tions from below upwards. Our criterion fails us, however, when wc
apply the same test to Zoroastrianism; for here we find an anti-Hellenic
Zealot movement—likewise flying religious colours—that did not erupt
from below upwards but was, on the contrary, imposed from above down¬
wards by Zealot-minded Arsacid and Sasanid autocrats who ‘established’

6 i2 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
a Zoroastrian Church as the official religious organization in their
dominions. And, if this Zoroastrian Zealot movement from above down¬
wards thus proves recalcitrant to our test, we shall find our tentative
criterion doubly discredited when we light upon the inverse intractable

E hcnomenon of an Herodian movement from below upwards. Yet we are
ound thus to characterize the peaceful penetration of the upper levels
of the Hellenic Society by freedmen successors of insurgent slaves who
had failed to throw off an Hellenic yoke, and by latter-day missionaries
of Cybele-worship, Isis-worship, Mithraism, and Manichaeism who
commended their Oriental religious wares to an Hellenic public by
putting them into an Hellenic dress.

If we pass from the field of the encounter between Hellenism and its
contemporaries to the other plots on our map, we shall meet with the
same experience. In an encounter between a nascent Western Christen¬
dom and the Scandinavians, an Herodian response in the Scandinavian
World to the Western Christian challenge duly took the form of a move¬
ment from above downwards in the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway,
and Sweden, but could not take effect otherwise than from below up¬
wards in the anarchic political environment of Iceland. In the encounter
between a Medieval Western Christendom and a Russian Orthodox
Christendom, again, our criterion holds good as between the Hanseati-
cizing patrician Hcrodians in the city-state of Novgorod, or the Polonizing
Ukrainian and White Russian nobles in the kingdoms of Poland and
Lithuania, and the anti-Uniatc Zealot Ukrainian and White Russian
Orthodox Christian subjects of the Polish and Lithuanian Crowns. But
what are we to make of the Ukrainian and White Russian Uniates? Are

we not confronted here with an Herodian movement rising from below
upwards? And what of those Muscovite autocrats who patronized the
Orthodox Christian Church? Arc they not unmistakable counterparts
of the Zealot Arsacid and Sasanid patrons of Zoroastrianism ? And does
not this affinity identify them for us as being likewise Zealots working
from above downwards ?

The farther we proceed, the more frequently our tentative criterion
fails us. The Phanariot and Brahman ministers of Muslim empire-
builders, who were Herodians duly transmitting the adopted language,
dress, and other external insignia of an alien Muslim culture to the lower
castes of their societies from above downwards, are counterbalanced by
members of those very lower orders who propagated the same Herodian
movement from below upwards in the more radical act of becoming con¬
verts to Islam. In a Far Eastern World under pressure from the Modern
West, an Herodianism duly working from above downwards at the
Chinese Imperial Court under the Ming and Manchu regimes and in
the Meiji Revolution in Japan is counterbalanced by the spectacle of a
Zealotism likewise working from above downwards in Japan under the
Tokugawa rdgime and returning to the charge in the same direction,
even after the Meiji Revolution, in the subsequent establishment of
Neo-Shinto as a state religion, while in the same Far Eastern World the
reactions to Western pressure that come up from below arc more fre¬
quently Herodian than Zealot in character. The Zealot eruption of the

ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 613
Boxers is counterbalanced here by the Herodianism of the seventeenth-
century Japanese and eighteenth-century Chinese Catholic Christian
martyrs; and similar well-springs of Herodianism rising from below can
be detected in the subterranean heroism of Japanese crypto-Christians
and secret students of Western learning in defiance of the Bakufu, in the
recrudescence of conversions to Christianity in nineteenth-century
Japan and China alike, and in the emergence of the Kuomintang. In the
submerged indigenous societies in the Americas the aristocratic Hero¬
dianism of a Garcilaso de La Vega is counterbalanced by the Herodian
mass-conversions of Andean, Paraguayan, and Mexican peasantries to
a Tridcntine Roman Catholic Christianity.

If we go on to apply our test to the encounter between the Modern
West and the Islamic World, we shall find it at first sight appearing to
answer better here. An Herodianism imposing itself from above down¬
wards is represented by antitypes of King Herod the Great in the persons
of Sultans Selim III and Mahmud II, 1 Mehmed 'All Pasha and Midhat
Pasha, President Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk, RizS Shah Pahlawi, and King
Amanallah; and this imposing array of Herodian statesmen operating
from above is confronted by a no less imposing array of Zealot insur¬
gents erupting from below: the explosive Wahhabi, Idrisi, Mahdist, and
SanusI fanatics on the Afrasian Steppe; the romantic patriots 'Abd-
al-Qadir and 'Abd-al-Karim in the Maghrib; the untamed Pathan
barbarians in the highlands of Eastern Iran. Yet here, too, we find pheno¬
mena that do not conform to our experimental pattern; for those
‘Zealot-drones’ the Janissaries and Mamluks were incubuses weigh¬
ing upon Society from above, not jacks-in-the-box bursting the lid
by springing up from below.

In the Hindu Society’s reactions to the Modern West the downward¬
working Herodianism of a British Serkar’s Brahman clerks and the
upward-working Zcalotism of a resurgent Kali-worship and a Neo-
Vedism conform to our test only to be offset by the anomalously upward-
working Herodianism of a British Indian Army’s recruits and a Brahmo
Samaj’s converts. In a latter-day Ottoman Orthodox Christendom the
Herodianism de haut en bas displayed by Westernizing Phanariot Otto¬
man Ministers of State is offset by the Zealotism de haut en bas of an
anti-schismatic Phanariot Orthodox Christian hierarchy, while Greek,
Serb, Bulgar, and Ruman nationalists alia Franca anticipate a Chinese
Kuomintang in propagating Herodianism from below upwards. In
Russia the classic contrast between Peter the Great’s Herodianism from
above downwards and the Zealotism from below upwards displayed by
obstinate Old Believers and explosive Cossack insurgents is blurred by
the anomalous spectacle of a Zealotism from above downwards which
reasserted itself in the repression of Ukrainian and White Russian
Uniatism by an eighteenth-century Petrine Russian Imperial Govern¬
ment after Peter the Great had crushed an earlier manifestation of the

« 'Reform in Turkey, as in Russia (until the mid-nineteenth century), came from
above, because the rulers were more revolutionary than their conservative subjects’
(Bailey. F. E.: British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement: A Study in Anglo-
Turkith Relations. 1826-1853 (Cambridge, Mass. 194a, Harvard University Press),
p. 223).

6 i 4 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
same anomalous phenomenon of a Zcalotism in high places in the act of
ridding Russia of the incubus of those Zealot-drones the Streltsy.

In the encounters between Cain and Abel along the borderline be¬
tween the Desert and the Sown the Herodianism from above downwards

S ractised by Scythian, Calmuck, and To Pa khans who cultivated the
edentary World’s alien way of life within the shelter of city walls, and
the Zealotism from below upwards that was displayed by the sedentary
subjects of Eurasian Nomad empire-builders in demonic revolts against
hated alien masters, are counterbalanced by a Zealotism from above
downwards through which these harshly oppressive sons of Abel in¬
curred their sedentary subjects’ implacable hatred, and by the Herodian¬
ism from below upwards that moved Greek and Chinese renegades from
the ranks of a sedentary society to take service in the armies of Hun and
Manchu Nomad invaders of the fields and cities of the Children of Cain.

When we glance, in conclusion, at our two instances of encounters
between two conflicting ideals within the bosom of a single society, we
shall find our tentative identifications of Zealotism with movements from
below upwards and of Herodianism with movements from above down¬
wards only partially corresponding with the facts here likewise. In the
encounter between a resurgent Shi'ah and an encompassing Sunni
World, Zealotism, it is true, duly erupts from below in the explosion of
IsmS'Il Shah Safawi’s Qyzylbashys, while Herodianism likewise con¬
forms to pattern by emanating from above downwards in Nadir Shah’s
unsuccessful attempt to undo Shah Isma'il’s work by an exercise of his
own autocratic power. On the other hand, in the history of the psycho¬
logical reactions of a Tridentine Roman Catholic Church that had been
thrown on to the defensive by the shock of the Protestant Reforma¬
tion, the Vatican’s eighteenth-century latitudinarianism vis-a-vis a Late
Modem Western scientific revolution was an exhibition of Herodianism
from above downwards that was as exceptional as it was belated. The
Vatican’s characteristic reaction was the Zealotism from above down¬
wards exhibited in a burning of Giordano Bruno which was one of the
sensational sequels to the Spanish Inquisition’s investiture with the
supreme command in the Roman Church’s perennial holy war against
heresy; and the same Zealot spirit moved the Papacy, from the ponti¬
ficate of Martin V to the pontificate of Pius IX, persistently to subordi¬
nate other considerations to the obsessive over-riding aim of preserving
and augmenting its own autocratic control over the Roman Church’s
government. Conversely, the most impressive manifestation of Hero¬
dianism in this domestic scene in Western Christendom’s modem life
was a crypto-Protestant movement which had rocketed up from below—
driven aloft, like a jet-plane, by the successive explosions of Jansenism,
Voltairianism, and Jacobinism.

Now that an empirically observed difference between movements
rising from below upwards and movements descending from above
downwards has proved, on trial, not to furnish us with a satisfactory
criterion for distinguishing Zealots and Hcrodians from one another, let
us sec whether a likewise empirically observed difference between vio¬
lent and gentle responses to challenges will serve our purpose any better.

ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 615

A priori this might seem improbable, since our study of schism in the
body social, 1 which was the context in which this antithesis between the
spirits of Violence and Gentleness first came to our notice, has shown us
both spirits manifesting themselves indiscriminately in the responses of
Proletariat and Dominant Minority alike to the challenge of disintegra¬
tion. Yet, if we apply this criterion in turn to our prototype case, at first
sight it does seem to be valid, as we register the contrast in temper be¬
tween Zealot Theudases and Judases, who were spoiling for a fight with
Roman masters of the World, and a Herod who earned his title to be
acclaimed as great in statesmanship by his determination to restrain his
ineptly fanatical Jewish subjects from indulging their mad impulse to
challenge Rome’s omnipotence. On this showing, we might tentatively
identify Zcalotism with the violent and Herodianism with the non¬
violent vein in an assaulted society’s feeling towards its alien assailant;
but these provisional identifications also will not stand the test of further
confrontation with the facts.

In the classic case in point, for instance, a suggestion that Herod’s
studious appeasement of Rome certified this appeaser to be a man of
peace would have been received with bitterly derisive laughter by sicarii
whose childish schemes for resorting to violence against Herod’s Roman
overlords had been anticipated by the better calculated violence with
which Herod had nipped such ‘dangerous thoughts’ in the bud. We have
lighted here upon a political dilemma that faces every Herodian poten¬
tate. The stronger his conviction of the necessity of coming to terms
with an alien civilization of decisively superior potency, the greater will
be his sense of the urgency of insisting that his subjects shall fall in with
his policy; and, if this policy is ever placed in jeopardy of being frus¬
trated by violent manifestations of Zealotism on their side, he will deem
it the lesser evil to meet violence with violence in his struggle to save his
Herodian statesmanship from being frustrated by the Zealots in his own
household, rather than to shrink from repressing these wild men by force
at the cost of allowing them to sweep him into a desperate insurrection
against a paramount alien Power. He can take no other line if he is not
to be untrue to himself, for the penalty of capitulation to the Zealots
would be not merely the negation of the weakling ruler’s own Herodian
policy; it would also be the death of the community for whose welfare
he is politically responsible.

Our prototype-episode also brings to light another point in which our
tentative equations of Herodianism w’ith Gentleness and of Zealotism
with Violence both break down. Any Herodian statesman who is in
earnest will be concerned not only to save his policy from being sabotaged
by Zealot violence but also to ensure that it shall not be frustrated by
Zealot passive resistance. 2 A lively awareness of this second, more insi¬
dious, danger in Herod’s lucid mind gave his ruthless will the signal to
chastise awkward Pharisees 3 as well as froward sicarii ; and the states-

1 In V. v. 35-376.

1 The non-violent vein in the Zealot Jewish opposition to a post-Alcxandrinc Hellen¬
ism has been noticed in V. v. 72-73.

) The ethos of the Pharisees has been noticed in V. v. 73, n. 4.

616 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
manlike consistency with which Herod thus meted out chastisement to
Pharisees and sicarii alike will remind us that Zealots arc no more in¬
variably violent than Herodians are invariably gentle. In the encounter
between a post-Alexandrine Hellenism and its Oriental contemporaries
the violent Zcalotism inherited by the Jewish sicarii from Maccabec fore¬
runners and likewise displayed in the Maccabaean Age by insurgent
peasants in Egypt and plantation-slaves in Sicily—not to speak of the
latter-day violence of Zoroastrian Sasanidae and of Primitive Muslim
Arabs who gave a by then senile Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ its coup de grdee
—divided the allegiance of Zealotism’s devotees with the gentle fanati¬
cism of the Pharisees, Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, and the Ncstorian and
Monophysitc Christian Hellenophobes, while, on the other side, Herod
the Great was not the only Hcrodian reagent to the impact of Hellenism
who was drawn into using violence by the exigencies of a policy of
appeasement. This statesman’s dilemma, which did not beset the non-
violcntly Herodian Egyptian gymnasiasts, freedmen novi homines, and
missionaries of Cybele-worship, Isis-worship, Mithraism, and Mani-
chaeism, inexorably led other Oriental client princes besides the Herods
into taking repressive measures against their own subjects in pursuance
of a pacific policy vis-d-vis the Roman Imperial Government which
invested these appeasers, in their victims’ eyes, with all the Satanic
attributes of the powers of darkness.

Our classic test case of the encounter between a post-Alexandrine
Hellenism and its Oriental contemporaries thus indicates that an empiri¬
cally observed distinction between veins of Violence and Gentleness
does not, in fact, provide us with an objective differentia for distinguish¬
ing between Zealots and Herodians; and this indication will be confirmed
by an extension of our field of vision.

The Hellenic spectacle of a Herod the Great being drawn into a
domestic policy of repression in defence of a foreign policy of appease¬
ment is reproduced in the political careers of Herodian potentates in the
histories of other encounters between the representatives of conflicting
cultures. This was likewise the tragic destiny of the Varangian war-lord
Vladimir the Great, 1 the Norwegian King Olaf Tryggvason, 2 the Kuo-
mintang Government of a Chinese Republic, Mehmed 'Alt Pasha,
Sultan Mahmud II, President Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk, Riz 5 Shah
Pahlawl, King Amanallah of Afghanistan, the leaders of Greek, Serb,
Bulgar, and Ruman Orthodox Christian militant nationalist movements,
Tsar Peter the Great, 3 the Sinomanc To Pa Prince Hiao W6n-ti, Nadir
Shah, and a Jacobin Committee of Public Safety that set up a Reign of
Terror in a Revolutionary Paris.

The successfully violent Herodian potentates in this catalogue of suc¬
cesses and failures would have sought to justify their crimes by insisting
that it was not only better to succeed like a Vladimir and an Atatiirk than

« See II. ii. 332. ... 1 See ‘bid.

3 Peter was a believer in the use of violence in dealing with his Zealot-minded sub¬
jects, not merely for the negative purpose of suppressing revolts against his policy of
westernization, but also for the positive purposes of forcing down their throats a West¬
ern system of education and a Western industrial technique (see BrQckner, A.: Peter der
Groste (Berlin 1879, Grote), pp. 514-16).

ZEALOTISM AND HEROD IAN ISM 6x7

to fail like an Olaf and an Amanallah, but was also better to make even
an unsuccessful attempt than to show oneself, like Selim III, 'too proud
to fight’, 1 or to make, like Scyles, a futilely craven attempt to evade an
uncscapable issue, or to be manoeuvred, like Midhat, into ‘missing the
bus’. 2 And these impenitently high-handed Herodian advocates of force
who had been rewarded by success for having the courage of their con¬
victions would not have accepted Selim’s Frankish historical adviser’s
plea that this ‘Osmanli Herodian’s Norman counterpart Rollo had been
able to induce his Scandinavian warriors to follow his Herodian lead
without having to take them by the scruff of the neck, or Scyles’ shaman
clairvoyant's plea that Scyles’ bloodily terminated crypto-Hellenic life
within the walls of Borysthenes had been justified posthumously by his
latter-day Calmuck counterparts’ adroitness in ‘getting by’ with their
conversion to a Petrine Russian Orthodox Christian culture within the
precincts of Stavropol. The triumphantly violent champions of Hero-
dianism would have dismissed this Calmuck and this Norman episode
as being exceptions which proved their own robust rule, and they would
have despised the tolerantly latitudinarian Popes of an eighteenth-cen¬
tury school as traitors to the august office whose traditional prerogatives
these Laodiceans were thus permitting to go by default. Nor would the
red-handed Herodians have been impressed by non-violent Phanariot
ministers of an Ottoman Porte or non-violent Brahman ministers of a
Mughal and a British Raj; for they would have pointed out that these
Herodian-minded civil servants were non-violent by necessity and not
by choice, since their masters always withheld from them the exercise
of the power of the sword.

If, in the teeth of these testimonies and arguments, we still sought to
vindicate our tentative identification of Herodianism with Non-Violence,
we could, of course, present a counter-list of non-violent Herodians, in¬
cluding the nineteenth-century Jewish Assimilationists in the Western
World; the whole of the Jewish diaspora—and all other diaspor&s at all
times in all places—on the economic plane; the Andean and the Mexican
converts to a Roman Catholic Christianity, ranging from the aristocrat
Garcilaso de la Vega to the primitive Guaranis; the Japanesc and Chinese
converts to the same religious faith who died for it as martyrs or lived
for it in the catacombs; the Japanese pagan martyrs who paid with their
lives for their secret study of a secular Late Modern Western Science;
and the Jansenist and Voltairian apostles of a Modem Western Weltan¬
schauung who waged their 'cold war’ of aggression against an apprehen¬
sively Zealot-minded Tridentine Roman Catholicism with the Orphic
weapon of propaganda. This list, however, would remain inconclusive
even if it could be lengthened ad infinitum ; for, if once we have conceded
that Herodianism is apt to find itself drawn into violence by the exigen¬
cies of its own aims when its exponents are political potentates, we have
implicitly conceded that the spirit of Non-Violence cannot be a distinc¬
tive characteristic of the Herodian ethos.

1 Woodrow Wilion on the 10th May, 19x5.

1 Neville Chamberlain on the 5th April, 1940, referring to Hitler, who was to mske
Chamberlain’s taunt recoil on its author's own head before the month was out.

X 2

B 2S&S.V1U

6 x8 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS

Conversely, we shall find, if we complete our application of this test
to our array of exponents of Zealotism, that the Oriental Zealot reactions
against a post-Alcxandrine Hellenism are not peculiar in displaying non¬
violent as well as violent manifestations. The split in Jewish Zealot ranks
between sicarii and Pharisees, and in servile Zealot ranks between slave
insurgents and freedmen arrivistes , is reproduced in a Russian Orthodox
Christendom in the split between the violence of Stenka Razin or
Pugachev and the non-violence of the Old Believers, and in an Ottoman
Orthodox Christendom in the contrast between the martial spirit of
Maniot and Montenegrin wild highlanders and the tameness of a con¬
servative-minded Greek Orthodox hierarchy. On the northern fringes
of a submerged Central American World the same parting of the ways
is proclaimed in the piquant juxtaposition of pugnaciously Zealot ‘Horse
Indians’ and pacifically Zealot Pueblos; and the hunter peoples of North
America who were engulfed by a tidal wave of immigration from the Old
World, that was rolling westwards, with irresistible force, from the
Atlantic seaboard of the United States, were likewise divided between
pacifists and believers in resistance. If we apply the same test to the
Jewish diaspork in the Western World, we find here, of course, that the
non-violent Zealotism of the Ritualist disciples of Rabbi Johanan ben
Zakkai had been a far older and far more widespread response to the
challenge of an encompassing alien culture than the recrudescence of
the spirit of the sicarii among a rabid minority of the Zionist settlers in
Palestine.

These instances suffice to demonstrate conclusively that Violence is
no more characteristic of Zealotism than Gentleness is; and this infer¬
ence cannot be cancelled by citing other instances in which the men of
violence in the Zealot ranks do not appear to be counterbalanced by the
presence of any men of peace. It might be difficult, for example, to cite
any non-violent Islamic Zealots to neutralize the cumulative impression
made on an observer’s mind by the militancy of Wahhabis, Idrlsls,
Mahdists, Sanusis, Pathans, and Maghribis, whose retort to Frankish
honey-thieves was to burst furiously out of their plundered hive like
bees eager to give their lives for the sake of lodging their stings in an
insufferable aggressor’s flesh. In the Far Eastern World, again, the vio¬
lent Zealotism of the Ming, the Tokugawa, and the Boxers appears to
hold the field unchallenged by the contrary example of any alternative
non-violent school. Yet these obvious exceptions will not avail to rehabi¬
litate a decisively discredited rule.

Perhaps the clearest proof that Violence is no distinctively Zealot
spirit is presented by the spectacle of the professional soldiers’ impar¬
tially indiscriminate distribution of their forces, of both higher and
lower quality, between the Zealot and Herodian camps. The most
highly distinguished of the professional soldiers begotten from encoun¬
ters between diverse civilizations had, indeed, been Herodians and not
Zealots. Peter the Great, Nadir Shah, Mehmed 'All, Mustafa Kcmal
Ataturk, and Riza Shah Pahlawi were conspicuous representatives of the
Herodian category. By contrast, the most conspicuous professional
soldiers whom we have come across in the Zealot hive are the discreditably

ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM

619

drone-like latter-day Streltsy, Mamluks, and Janissaries. To find Zealot
professional soldiers worthy to compare with the most eminent of their
Herodian brothers-in-arms, we must call up those stalwart Illyrian
soldier-emperors 1 who showed their mettle in leading the last counter¬
attack of a demoralized Hellenism against a triumphant Christianity,
and those indomitable Spartiatc ‘Peers’* who defended, with their backs
to the wall, 'the peculiar institution’ of a culturally dissident Hellenic
city-state which had deliberately parted company with the main body of
the Hellenic Society in order to march straight into a spiritual desert of
Militarism at the very moment when the rest of Hellas was emerging out
of darkness into light. Yet the height of heroism to which a Spartiate
Leonidas rose gives the measure of the depth of demoralization to which
his nephew Pausanias sank; and, moreover, if wc expand the Zealot
contingent in our muster of professional soldiers by bringing up rein¬
forcements that are of dubious quality, we shall be bound, in equity, to
dilute the Herodian contingent likewise by calling up those barbarian
mercenaries who had been enlisted in the professional military defence
of Civilization on the anti-barbarian frontiers of so many oecumenical
empires. 3

Our now manifest failure in our repeated search for a valid criterion
for distinguishing Zealots and Hcrodians from one another suggests that
this quest may be a wild goose chase and prompts us to make a fresh
attack on our problem from a different quarter. Instead of taking as our

E int of departure a professed antithesis and antagonism for which we
ve no better evidence than the two parties’ own concordant, but per¬
haps collusive, protestations, let us take the Janus-faced ambivalence of
many of the most impressive of the soldiers on parade, which is a fact
open to observation by the spectator with his own unprejudiced eyes, in
the teeth of the troops’ unsupported and perhaps not disinterested asser¬
tions. If wc now remind ourselves of the nature of the emergency that
has brought both Zealots and Herodians into action, we shall see that
this ambivalent appearance, so far from being surprising, is actually just
what we should expect. For both parties alike are engaged in the des¬
perate enterprise of counter-attacking an alien enemy force that has
lodged itself within the gates of their assaulted city. The common objec¬
tive of both the Zealot and the Herodian defenders of their common
home is to retrieve this perilous situation; and, in so far as they may be
taking different lines, these are merely different tactical approaches to
an identical strategic objective.

Moreover, it is manifest that neither warrior can hope to achieve a
common practical purpose if he insists on pushing his own tactical
theory to the extremity of its logical conclusions. A Coroebus, accoutred
in the arms of a fallen foeman, 4 who carried his ruse de guerre to the
point of falling in, shoulder to shoulder, with his slain adversary’s com¬
batant comrades in the enemy assaulting column, would be reducing his
Herodianism ad absurdum by assisting in the capture of a Troy that
he had taken up arms to save from falling; and in real life wc do not

* See V. vi. 207. 2 See III. iii. eo-79.

1 See V. v. 461-6, and pp. 40-41, above. * Virgil: A triad, Book II, 11 . 383-401.

620 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
find historical instances of Herodians thus stultifying themselves by a
suicidal self-caricature. Even those Herodian potentates who have gone
farthest in imposing an aggressive enemy civilization’s culture on their
subjects on the technological, economic, social, and intellectual planes
have usually gone to these unwelcome lengths with the object of thereby
preserving intact at least the continuity and independence of the com¬
monwealth for whose government they have been responsible, while
nonviolent Herodians whose policy has not been dictated to them by
any political responsibilities have usually been aiming at the preservation
of some other element in their own assaulted cultural heritage—for
instance, an ancestral religion or, at a minimum, the bare memory of the
submerged society’s former existence through the registration of an
entry, such as Garcilaso de la Vega made, in the records of the victorious
aggressor society by whose act the victim society has been sent to join
the shades in Sheol.

On the other side of an imaginary line dividing an Herodian from a
Zealot track, those devoted Jewish and Red Indian violent Zealots
whose scruples have inhibited them from carrying on their ‘holy war’ on
the Sabbath Day 1 or from conducting it with the White Man’s weapons 2
have condemned their own cause to defeat by these sublimely unpractical
sacrifices on the altar of superstition. By contrast, every practical-
minded Zealot has made concessions to Herodianism, while every
practical-minded Herodian has seasoned his own Laodicean philosophy
with a grain of Zealot salt. On this showing, the Zealot and Herodian
standpoints look, not so much like two isolated peaks sundered by an
impassable gulf, as like the upper and lower ranges of the gamut of a
musical instrument in which the interval between this instrument’s two
acoustical extremes is bridged by a continuous gradation of intermediate
notes, and on which the highest and lowest notes of all are seldom or
never struck by any player who is an even barely competent performer.

Thus a Zealot who has the common sense and the strength of mind to
refuse to bring his principle to grief by being guilty of a suicidally pedan¬
tic loyalty to it will find himself perforce stepping one pace forward from
his own bridgehead on to the bridge that spans the gulf between his
own and his Herodian twin brother’s standpoint; but ‘la distance n’y
fait rien; il n’y a que lc premier pas qui coute’ ; 3 and, when once this first
step has been taken, the insidiously potent law that 'one thing leads to
another’ will guide our Zealot pilgrim’s feet into the way, not of peace, 4
but of progressive compromise, until it has carried him, pedetemptim et
gradatim , s right over the keystone of Chinvat’s arch on to the approaches
towards an Herodian bridgehead on the farther side of an insensibly
traversed intervening space.

This self-defeat of Zealotism in its tug-of-war with Herodianism on a

1 5, cc V ’. v> 3 3 x> n * *• * See ibid -

1 The Marquise du Deffand {vivtbat a.d. 1730-1823) in a letter of the 7th July, 1763,

to d’Alembert, apropos of the legend that Saint Denis had no sooner been beheaded than
he picked up his head in his hands and proceeded to carry it for a distance of two
leagues (The Oxford Dictionary of Quotation! (London 1041, Oxford University Press),
p. 562, col. b).

4 Luke i. 79. j Cicero: Ad Familiaru, Book IX, Letter xiv, $ 7.

ZEALOTISM AND HEROD I AN ISM 621

hazardous pitch dizzily overhanging a deadly gulf calls up an image that
has haunted our imagination once before. We have had a pre-view of
this play in looking on at the awesomely ironic pageant of the self-defeat
of Archaism, 1 and in seeing this dumb show translated into a play in
which the dramatis personae have all been divers impersonations of a
Protean 'saviour with the time-machine’. 2 In the plot of that psycho¬
logical drama the way in which Archaism defeats itself is by passing over
into Futurism; and we can now see that Zealotism is the psychological
equivalent of Archaism, and Herodianism of Futurism, in a situation in
which the internal challenge of social disintegration has been replaced—
or reinforced—by the external challenge of an alien enemy within the
gates of the challenged society’s cultural citadel.

Nor is this the only memory of previous intuitions that we recollect,
as the spectacle of the metamorphosis of Zealotism into Herodianism
passes before our eyes. The examples, cited at the close of our foregoing
survey, of psychological reactions along recognizably Zealot and Hero-
dian lines in the domestic histories of civilizations are reminders that
we have also already come across other equivalents of Zealotism and
Herodianism in studying the intractability of institutions in the course
of our inquiry into the reasons why civilizations break down. 3 We have
watched this intractability asserting itself by frustrating Man’s attempts
to adjust his existing institutions to meet a new situation produced by
the genesis of new dynamic forces or creative movements within a
society’s bosom, and we have seen that this frustration may take either
of the two alternative courses of precipitating revolutions or engendering
enormities. We can now see that these crises arising from the emergence
of newly created forces welling up from within arc analogous to the
crises produced by the impact of newly encountered forces impinging
from outside, and that the enormities in which a civilization comes to
grief are fruits of Zealotism, while the revolutions which are the alterna¬
tive penalty for maladjustment are no less characteristic fruits of the
antithetical Hcrodian response to the same challenge.

The Ineffectiveness of the Zealot-Herodian Response

If we have been right in our verdict that the ostensible contrast be¬
tween Zealotism and Herodianism masks a family likeness, and that
these two psychological reactions to the intrusion of an alien culture are,
in truth, merely two variations on an identical theme, we should expect
to find this affinity of character translating itself into a similarity of
effect; and, sure enough, we do find the unmasked resemblance between
Zealotism and Herodianism betraying itself in nothing so patently as in
their common failure.

The ineffectiveness of this Zealot-Herodian response to the challenge
of a cultural assault is manifest in the historic case that w’e have taken as
our prototype. In Jewry’s encounter with a post-Alexandrine Hellenism,
neither variant of the assaulted society’s defensive reaction availed
to achieve the common purpose of finding a solution for Jewry’s Hel¬
lenic problem that would be practicable and at the same time tolerable.

I See V. vi. 94-97. * See V. vi. 213-42. 3 Sec IV. iv. 133-24 5 -

622 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
Herod the Great and his school of Herodian politiques failed to persuade
or compel their Zealot-minded compatriots to acquiesce in a political
autonomy under Roman hegemony which would have given the Pales¬
tinian Jewish community a chance of coming to terms with Hellenism
without losing its own communal identity in its ancestral home, while
the Zealots succeeded in sabotaging this Herodian policy, only to bring
the Palestinian Jewish community to the destruction which the Hcro-
dians had foreseen and foretold as being inevitable if the Zealots should
once succeed in taking the bit between their teeth. The catastrophes
of a.d. 70 and a.d. 135 proclaimed the bankruptcy of Herodianism in
closing the door on the possibility of a cultural compromise between
Judaism and Hellenism, and at the same time exposed the folly of
Zealotism by turning a Jerusalem that, in the Zealots’ dreams, was to
have been the sacrosanct capital of a Messianic Jewish state into the for¬
bidden city Aclia Capitolina, whose pagan precincts were placed out of
bounds for all heirs of the Covenant of Circumcision. 1 Thereafter, any
Jew who wished to share in the good things of Hellenic life had to pur¬
chase his freedom of the Hellenic cosmopolis by making a clean cut with
his own Jewish cultural heritage, in the fashion set by the Alexandrian
Jewish Platonist philosopher Philo’s nephew the Roman citizen and
civil sen-ant Tiberius Alexander, while the only way left open for main¬
taining a distinctive Jewish communal life was Rabbi Johanan ben
Zakkai’s forlorn hope of ritualism-in-diaspord.

It would be superfluous to call up again the rest of our muster of
Zealots and Herodians to demonstrate that the same pair of psycho¬
logical reactions resulted in the same failure in all other encounters be¬
tween an assaulted society and an assailant culture in which the tragedy
had already been played out to its conclusion by the time of writing; for
these repetitions of Jewry’s classic experience stand on record in this
work in our foregoing survey of encounters between contemporaries. 1
In this place we need only observe that the ineffectiveness of the Zcalot-
Herodian reaction has been registered implicitly a priori in our identi¬
fication of Zealotism with an Archaism that breeds enormities, and of
Herodianism with a Futurism that precipitates revolutions, since revolu¬
tions are confounded with enormities, and futurists with archaists, in
the common grave of their uniform failure.

The nature of the corresponding failure of Zealotism and Herodianism
may be probed to its spiritual essence, below its social surface, by an
intellect that does not disdain the immemorially ancient symbolism in
which the subconscious depths of the Soul express intellectually ineffable
spiritual truths. A poetic imagery in which the spirit reveals itself in the
physical disguise of water has already given us an insight into the ‘con¬
ductivity’ of a universal state; 3 for, when we liken an oecumenical empire
to the Ocean into which all Earth’s rivers discharge, we find that this
apparently still and dead expanse of salt water is in constant and creative
motion, and that the rivers, which appear so mobile and lively by con¬
trast, would soon cease to flow if their sources were not perpetually being
fed by the life-giving rain that is perpetually being distilled from the

« Act* vii. 8. 1 On pp. 346-453, above. i See VI. vii. 60-61.

ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 623

surface-water of the Sea as it perpetually ascends into Heaven. In our
subsequent study of the spiritual influences derived by transfrontier
barbarians from their proximity to the body social of a civilization on
the other side of the limes of a universal state, we have found our insight
in a simile' in which we have likened this limes to a dam that first con¬
verts the upper basin of a mountain torrent into a reservoir and then
brings the accumulated waters down in spate when the barrage collapses
at last under a pressure that has mounted to the breaking-point.

In terms of the same expressive imager)-, we may liken the Zealot-
Herodian reaction to the riposte contrived by a pixie whose Lake of the
Woods, inviolate hitherto since the beginning of Time, has suddenly
and unexpectedly been sullied by the keel, and ruffled by the paddle, of
an audacious backwoodsman’s canoe. What apotropaic use will this out¬
raged pixie’s fury and dismay move her to make of her superhuman
magic power in order to checkmate the sacrilegious human intruder? If
her defensive psychological reaction takes a Zealot turn, the Lady of the
Lake will render her waters unnavigable by freezing them solid, while,
if it takes an Herodian turn, she will render navigation impossible by the
alternative retort of draining her lake-bed dry. Whether the sacrosanct
water is frozen or whether it is drained away, it will have been made
equally impervious to the passage of a man-made vessel. Yet, in working
either miracle, the luckless nymph will have betrayed her sub-human
naivetd; for, in her single-minded anxiety to put the boatman out of
action, she has lost sight of the dcvastatingly simple truth that Man’s
sophisticated and hazardous art of navigation 2 comes considerably less
easy to him than the human biped’s natural method of locomotion. A
lake that has been closed to navigation by being either drained or frozen
can be traversed by a land-lubber dry-shod. In short, the nymph will
have reacted to the human intruder in a way that will have defeated her
intentions by serving his purposes. So far from effectively arresting the
invader’s progress, her magic tour de force will have appreciably facili¬
tated it.

3. Evangelism

Was this uniform self-defeat of Zealotism and Herodianism the last
word that the oracles of History and Mythology had to speak when
asked for light on the spiritual consequences of encounters? If it were
indeed the last, then the outlook for Mankind would be forbidding, for
then we might be driven to the conclusion that our present enterprise of
Civilization was an impracticable attempt to climb an unscalable pitch. 3

This great enterprise was initiated, as we may recollect, 4 by a new
departure in which Human Nature’s powers of imagination, intrepidity,
and versatility proved a match for the difficulties besetting the change
of orientation which Mankind managed to achieve at that momentous
stage in human history. A Primitive Man, who had long since been
brought to a halt by an Epimethean direction of his faculty of mimesis

* See pp. 3-11, above. 1 See II. i. 336-7.

J This simile of the climber’s pitch has been propounded in II. i. xgz- 5 -

* See ibid., p. 192.

624 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
towards his stick-in-the-mud elders and ancestors, now reliberated his
Promethean tlan' by redirecting this same socially indispensable faculty
towards creative personalities who offered themselves to him as path¬
finding pioneers. How far, a latter-day inquirer was bound to ask him¬
self, was this new move going to carry these primitive culture-heroes’
epigoni ? And, when its momentum had been exhausted, would they be
able to draw upon a hidden store of psychic energy by repeating the
creative stroke with which Moses had once conjured the water out of
the rock ? 2 If the answer to this last question were to be in the nega¬
tive, it would be a bad look-out for a half-baked Man-in-Process-of-
Civilization; and this was why, for him, an archaistic Zealotism’s and a
futuristic Hcrodianism’s common curse of ineffectiveness was, in itself,
so disquieting an omen.

The omen was disquieting because the Zealot-Herodian reaction in
particular, like the Archaist-Futurist reaction in general, was manifestly
an unsuccessful attempt to re-perform the miraculous act by which a
creative minority of Primitive Mankind had once succeeded in passing
over from the Yin-state of an apparently hard-set stagnation into the
Yang-movement of an astounding renewal of progress. In that success¬
fully negotiated transition from Primitive Life to Civilization the adop¬
tion of the forward-looking attitude had released a creative energy strong
enough to overcome the backward-looking attitude’s inertia; but, in the
Archaist-Futurist and Zealot-Herodian reactions of a Civilization in
trouble, neither of the two formally antithetical component attitudes was
proving to have any virtue in it. Was this the end of the story?

Perhaps the true answer to this anxious question was that this might
well be the end if the whole story was comprised in the history of
Civilization, but not if Man’s attempt at Civilization was no more than
one chapter in the story of a perennial encounter between Man and God.
In the myth of the Flood as recounted in the Book of Genesis, the sequel
to a cataclysm in which Adam’s brood had been all but annihilated by
their outraged Maker was God’s proclamation of an ‘everlasting cove¬
nant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the
Earth’. The Creator’s promise to Noah and his salvaged crew was that
‘the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh’ ; 3 the token
of this covenant was the bow set and seen in the cloud; and indeed we
have discovered, in the act of registering the equal failure of Archaism
and Futurism, and, likewise, of Enormities and Revolutions, that, in
either of those two apparently inescapable dilemmas, there is a third
possibility which offers a hard-pressed Theseus a chance of escaping
imminent destruction by boldly vaulting between the terrible horns
on which a Minotaur has been seeking to impale his puny human
antagonist.

When Life is challenged by the emergence of some new dynamic force
or creative movement from within, the living individual or society is not
thereby condemned to make the futile choice between breaking down by
perpetrating an enormity and breaking down by detonating a revolution;
there also lies open a middle way of salvation in which a mutual adjust-

* See III. iii. 114. * Erod. xvii. 1-7. » Gen. ix. 8-17.

EVANGELISM 625

mcnt between the old order and the new departure can arrive at a
harmony on a higher level which is another name for growth. 1 And
similarly, when Life is challenged by a breakdown that has become an
accomplished fact, an individual or society that is striving to recapture
from Fate the initiative in its fight for life is not condemned to make the
no less futile choice between the two inherently impracticable escapades
of attempting to jump clear of the Present up the Time-stream into a
lost Past and attempting to jump clear down the Time-stream into an
unattained Future; 2 for, here too, there lies open the middle way of a
withdrawal through a movement of Detachment followed by a return
that reveals itself in a Transfiguration. 3 In the prosaic language of a
nascent post-Modern Western science of Psychology,

‘In every conflict a dynamic opposition occurs, and in this opposition
some elements transcend from one side to the other and vice versa.
Through this reciprocal action ... a new condition is reached which was
not a predictable outcome of the conflict.' 4

Is this divine act of new creation performed likewise when the en¬
counter between Man and God achieves itself in a collision between two
diverse human societies, and when the pair of equally barren psycho¬
logical reactions in the souls of the children of the assaulted society are
the two that we have now learnt to know as Zealotism and Herodianism ?
As we stand on the marge of the Pool of Bethcsda 5 and watch a savage
Zealot seeking to save the sacred water from a dominant Gentile’s
polluting touch by freezing it, while a ruthless Herodian is seeking
simultaneously to secure the same ritual satisfaction by draining the
precious water away, our eyes turn towards the surrounding porches to
gaze pityingly upon that ‘great multitude of impotent folk—of blind,
halt, withered’—whom we see lying there ‘waiting for the moving of the
water’.

The Zealot’s and the Herodian’s feelings remain stonily unmoved by
this spectacle of their afflicted fellow human beings’ piteous plight and
sore need for healing. These two rival self-appointed champions of
Jewry arc both so inhumanly intent on the waging of their cultural war
with Hellenism in accordance with their respective tactics that, in the
service of an alleged military necessity, they neither of them feel any
compunction as they deprive their own forefather Abraham’s suffering
children of their last ebbing hope of salvation. Will this unmerciful pair
of pedants succeed, between them, in consummating their futile atrocity
before the season arrives for the angel to go down into the pool and
trouble the water with the miraculously transfiguring effect, for the
sufferer who then first steps in, of making him whole of whatsoever
disease he has had ? No answer to our question is to be expected from
combatants in a cultural war who are totally preoccupied with the con¬
duct of their Lilliputian hostilities; but, above the un-Homeric hubbub

> See IV. iv. 133. * See V. v. 383-9°-

‘ Baynes, '^Cj.T^ythology of the Soul (London 19^0, Baillifre, Tindall & Cox;
1949, Methuen), p. 32°- Compare the present Study, II. 1. 300-1.

* John v. 2-9.

626 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
of a Judaeo-Hellenic Battle of Frogs and Mice, let us hear also what
Saint Paul saith : x

‘Is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not also of the Gentiles? Yes,
of the Gentiles also;* for there is no difference between the Jew and the
Greek; for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him. 3
For by one spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we be Jews
or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free.* There is neither Jew nor Greek,
there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye
arc all one in Christ Jesus 5 —where there is neither Greek nor Jew,
circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free;
but Christ is all and in all.’ 6

The blessing vouchsafed to Saint Paul and his fellow evangelists is:

‘He that shall lose his life for My sake and the Gospel’s, the same shall
save it.’ 7

In Paul, Judaism did lose its life in so far as, for some two hundred years
and more before Paul’s day, Judaism had been living for the ideal of
preserving its own ancestral Syriac way of life against penetration by the
masterfully intrusive alien culture of Hellenism. Paul was born and
brought up in a Gentile Tarsus as a Pharisee—a cultural ‘isolationist’ 8 —
and at the same time and place he received a Greek education and found
himself a Roman citizen. The Zealot and the Herodian path thus both
lay open in front of him, and as a young man he opted for Zealotism.

« In the Tmian evangelist’s heavenly Christian strains we can catch echoes of the
lovely pagan music of a Mantuan poet who, like Paul, had been a Roman citizen. Paul’s
discernment that ‘there is no difference between the Jew and die Greek’ had been
anticipated, almost phrase for phrase and rhythm for rhythm, in a Virgilian Dido’s
Trot Tyriiuque mihi nullo discrimine agelur (Aeneid, Book I, 1. 574), while Aeneas’
Paribus se legibus ambaej inviclae gtntes aelema infoedera miltant (Aeneid, Book XII, 11 .
190-1) foreshadows Paul’s 'By one spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we
be Jews or Gentiles’. Virgil's poem is, in truth, the pagan gospel of the cult of an Oecu¬
menical Collective Humanity—Mankind incorporated into one universal body politic
under the aegis of a Dea Roma nnd under the auspices of a Divus Caesar—and it was no
accident that a spiritual war to the death with this noblest of all avatars of the most vicious
of all forms of idolatry should have been the earliest ordeal of an infant Christian Church.

With an eye to the particular theme of the present chapter of this Study, we may notice,
in passing, that Virgil was aware of the spiritual truth that a declaration of the common
bankruptcy of Herodianism and Zealotism is, in the same breath, the revelation of a
saving middle way. When the inevitable detection of Coroebus’s Herodian ruse of
putting on the armour of a slain and despoiled antagonist has been followed by the
slaying of Coroebus himself and those other comrades of Aeneas who have followed
Corocbus's example ( Aeneid , Book II, 11. 424-9), the mythical Dardanian prototype of a
mundane Roman saviour of Society is restrained, by the intervention of the Gods, from
acting on a suicidal impulse to find his alternative to an Herodian's abortive stratagem
in a Zealot’s heroic death. When the epiphany of Venus has been frustrated by the obsti¬
nacy of Anchiscs, and the hero sprung from the union of the goddess nnd the mortal
reverts, in desperation, to his Zealot watchword Moriamur el in media arma ruamus (I.
353) in his cry Arma, viri.ferle arma : vocal lux ultima viclos ( 1 . 668), the Man of Des¬
tiny’s heart is lifted, at this critical moment, above an ephemeral battle by the sudden
miracle of the child Iulus’s transfiguration (II. 681-4). The tongue of fire that sits upon
Iulus’a head, and the khvarenak that plays about his locks and temples, arc Virgilian
counterparts of the tongues of fire that crown the heads of Christ’s apostles on the Day
of Pentecost (Acts ii. 3), nnd of the sheen of Christ's own face and raiment in the mani¬
festation of His divinity on the mountain (Matt. xvii. 2; Mark ix. 3; Luke ix. 29).

* Rom. iii. 29. a Rom. x. 12. * r Cor. xii. 13.

1 Gal. iii. 28. ® Col. iii. ix.

1 Mark viii. 33. Cp. Matt. x. 39 and xvi. 25; Luke ix. 24 and xvii. 33; John xii. 25.

• See V. v. 73, n. 4.

EVANGELISM 627

But, when he was plucked out of this perverse initial Zealot course by his
vision on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus, Paul did not then per¬
force become an Herodian. He did not then find himself confined to
a choice between one or other of these two barrenly defensive and
uncreative lines of action; there was revealed to him a creative way
which transcended them both.

Paul traversed the Roman Empire preaching neither Judaism versus
Hellenism nor Hellenism versus Judaism, but a new way of life—Christ¬
ianity—which drew, without prejudice, upon the spiritual wealth of
both those two contending cultures and offered itself, with an impartially
benignant hospitality, to any member of cither of those two societies—
or of any other civilization within the oecumenical theatre of the Evan-

S list’s spiritual operations. No cultural frontier could stand in this
ospcl’s way; for the Christian Church was not just a new society of
the same species as the civilizations whose encounters with one another
we have been investigating in the present Part of this Study; it was a
society of a different species, distinguished by a new revelation of the
nature of God and of the character of Man’s relation to Him. The crea¬
tively dramatic peripeteia , or ‘reversal of the situation’, which followed
from the encounter between Jewry and Hellenism, was thus not achieved
in any episode among the vicissitudes of alternating victor)' and defeat
in these two civilizations’ long-drawn-out duel; it was manifested in the
transcending of both these civilizations by a newly revealed higher reli¬
gion that had made its epiphany ‘above the battle’ which Judaism and
Hellenism were fighting with one another.

At the date at which these present words were being written, the
Syriac and the Hellenic Civilization alike had long since passed out of
existence, and even the Jewish relic of the Syriac Society was extant
only in the shape of a social fossil; but the Christian Church, born of a
creative response to the challenge which the encounter between those
two now extinct civilizations had once presented to their children, was
then still the outstanding spiritual force in the oecumenical mission-field
of a Westernizing Latter-day World; and, in the light of the first nine¬
teen centuries of Christianity’s earthly pilgrimage, a twentieth-century
historian might venture to predict that Christianity’s transfiguring effect
on the World up to date would be outshone by its continuing operation
in the future.

A Christian-bred historian, however, would be a traitor to the genius
of his ancestral faith if, in allowing himself to think this serenely sanguine
thought, he were also to allow the abominable and desolating idol of a
corporately worshipped Self to resume possession of his soul in the
sacrilegious guise of a chauvinism on behalf of one finite revelation of
God’s infinite light, merely because the Judaeo-Hellcnic facet of a terres¬
trial lamp’s dark glass 1 happened, as a fortuitous consequence of his
time and place of birth, to be more familiar to him personally than
Christianity’s Indo-Hellenic counterpart. To guard against the sin of
both heart and head that a Christian would be committing most griev¬
ously against God’s Divine Majesty, provoking most justly God’s wrath

1 1 Cor. xiii. 12.

628 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS
and indignation' against the sinner, if he should refuse to honour any
manifestation whatsoever of the one and indivisible Divine Light, the
Christian-bred student of God’s dealings with Man will remind himself
that a post-Alexandrinc Hellenism, after forcing an entry into a Hittitc,
an Egyptiac, and a Babylonic, as well as a Syriac, World in the fourth
century b.c., had proceeded, in the second century b.c., to push its way
into an Indie World likewise, and that, out of this Indo-Hcllcnic en¬
counter, a higher religion akin to Christianity had made its epiphany.

The MahSyina transfigured the self-regardingly Self-dispelling asktsis
of the Hinayanian arhat into the unselfishly Self-detaining evangelism
of the Mahayanian bodhisattva. 1 2 A philosophy that had offered the
spiritual athlete (on condition of his proving able to stay the arduous
course) his salvation through the achievement of a complete detachment
from both himself and his fellow living creatures, was transformed into
a religion whose ideal figure was not the sage attaining Nirvana for him¬
self but the saviour of his fellows who, for their sakes, had made the
supreme personal sacrifice, not of suffering the pains of a voluntarily
accepted death, but of enduring the pains of a voluntarily protracted
existence, in order to guide the feet of others into the way of peace 3 at
the price of postponing, in saecula saeculorum, this Buddha-Saint’s own
entry into his hard-won rest. 4

At the time of writing, half-way through the twentieth century of the
Christian Era, Christianity and the Mahayana were the two great living
witnesses 5 to the spiritual significance of the social phenomenon of en¬
counters between civilizations—a phenomenon that had been recurring
with an ever greater frequency and at an ever higher potency since the
species of societies called civilizations had made its first appearance
some five or six thousand years ago. Humanly speaking, it was a creative
response to the challenge of one of these encounters that had brought
to birth Christianity and the Mahayana and Islam and Hinduism.

In an age in which the entire habitable and traversable face of the
planet had been roped in by far-reaching Western hands to constitute
thenceforth a single common arena, common exercise-ground, and, per¬
haps one day, common home for a united human family, it might be
predicted that, in the next chapter of a henceforth oecumenical human
history, the four higher religions sprung from the ruins of civilizations
of the second generation were destined to have an intimate spiritual
encounter with one another; and, whatever the outcome of this great
imminent spiritual event might prove to be, it was evidently likely to
inaugurate a new era in human life in This World.

The goal of Man’s spiritual endeavours in an unborn age beyond the
historian’s horizon might be divined by an understanding heart 6 from
a reading 7 of the words that the Tarsian Jewish apostle of Christianity

1 The General Confession in the Order of the Administration of the Lord's Supper,

or Holy Communion, in the Book of Common Prayer according to the Use of the Church
of England.

* Sec V. v. 133-6 and 552; V. vi. 148 and 164, n. 3; and XII. ix. 632-3.

» Luke i. 79 - * Psalm xcv. 11.

5 See V. v. 370-2. _ 4 1 Kings iii. 9.

7 Matt. xxiv. 15; Mark xiii. 14.

EVANGELISM 629

in partibus Gentilium is reported to have uttered in an impromptu
address 1 to an Athenian audience on the Areopagus.

'God that made the World and all things therein .. . hath made of one
blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the Earth, and hath
determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation,
that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find
Him—though He be not far from every one of us; for in Him we live and
move and have our being, as certain also of your own poets have said: 1
“For we are also his offspring’’.’

1 Acts xvii. 22-31.

1 Aratus’s Phatnomena, 1. 5, echoed in Clcanthcs’ Hymn to Zeus, 1. 4 (see V. vi. u,
n. 2).—A.J.T.

VIII. C, ANNEX

THE TEMPORARY HALT OF THE
WESTERN CIVILIZATION’S FRONTIER
IN NORTH AMERICA AT THE EDGE OF
THE GREAT PLAINS

The occupation of North America by a Western Civilization which had
originated on the other side of the Atlantic had been one of the greatest
feats of expansion known to History down to the time of writing. This
gigantic enterprise had been carried out within a period of less than four
hundred years, reckoning from a . d . 1519, the year in which Cortes and
his companions had made, in Mexico, the first permanent lodgement
of West European invaders on Continental North American ground,
to a . d . 1890, the year in which the internal frontier of agricultural
settlement within the expanded political boundaries of the United States
had been wiped out by the completion of the effective occupation and
settlement of the whole national territory. Within those 371 years the
whole of North America had in fact been occupied up to its natural
frontiers—the Pacific coast and the southern edge of the Esquimaux’
preserve in the Arctic Zone 1 —by conquerors and colonists who had
landed at divers points on the Atlantic coast from a . d . 1519 onwards.

The magnitude of this achievement of the pioneers of the Western
Civilization in North America may be measured bv comparing it with
the same civilization’s previous expansion in the Old World. Starting
from its original patrimony—those derelict western provinces of the
Roman Empire in which the North European and Eurasian barbarian
invaders had been converted to Latin Christianity without being sub¬
sequently conquered either by the Arab Caliphate or by the East Roman
Empire—the Western Civilization, during its Dark Ages and Middle
Ages, had taken more than six hundred years, reckoning from the open¬
ing of Charlemagne’s counter-offensive against the pagan Saxons in
a.d. 772 to the conversion of the pagan Lithuanians to Latin Christian¬
ity in a.d. 1386, to occupy the northern zone of Western Europe from
the northern fringes of the Rhine Basin and the Upper Danube Basin up
to the southern fringe of the Arctic Zone. Before that, the Hellenic
Civilization’s occupation of Western Europe, from the Appennines up
to a natural frontier provided by the shores of the Atlantic and an
artificial limes drawn along the Rhine-Danube river line, 2 had taken a
quarter of a millennium, reckoning from the beginning of the Roman
advance into the Po Basin after the close of the First Romano-Punic
War in 241 b.c. down to Augustus’s decision, after the Roman military
disasters of a.d. 6-9 at the hands of the Pannonians and the Cherusci,
to abandon his attempt to carry the frontier forward to the line of the
Elbe. In this post-Alexandrine Hellenic and in the subsequent Medieval
Western expansion of a civilization into European territory previously
* Sec III. Ui. 4-7.

1 See 'The Rhine-Danube Frontier of the Roman Empire’, in V. v. 591-5.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 631
occupied by barbarians or by primitive peoples, the area occupied had in
either case been trifling by comparison with the area in North America,
within the natural frontiers indicated above, that was occupied by the
Western Civilization between a.d. 1519 and a.d. 1890.

Moreover, the major part of this Western achievement in North
America that was consummated in a.d. 1890 had been accomplished
within the last 127 years out of the total span of 371 by the people of
the United States within the middle transcontinental zone of North
America over which the United States’ political domain had expanded.
The eventual area of the Continental United States west of the Appa¬
lachian and Alleghany Mountains had been occupied and settled since
the end of the Seven Years War (gerebatur a.d. 1756-63).

The American people’s spectacular contribution to the total result
was, of course, matched, and was also, no doubt, at least partly ac¬
counted for, by the unusual advantages which the United States had
enjoyed during this expansive period. She had, in fact, succeeded in
having the best of both worlds for a hundred years and more. She had
managed to remain economically 'in’ the Old World after having ex¬
tricated herself from being politically ‘of’ it.

Between a.d. 1763 and a.d. 1820 the whole of North America had
been liberated from European political entanglements as a result of the
elimination of French rule from Canada and the Mississippi Basin in the
Seven Years War (gerebatur a.d. 1756-63), the elimination of British
rule from the Thirteen Colonies and Florida in the Revolutionary War
(gerebatur a.d. 1775-83), the Louisiana Purchase completed in a.d. 1803,
the acquisition of Florida from Spain by the United States in a.d. 1819,
the liquidation of Spanish rule in Mexico in A.D. 1820, and, above all,
Great Britain’s policy of drawing a cordon of sea-power round the Con¬
tinental European bases of the other Great Powers of the day. If the
British Navy had not made it impracticable for Napoleon to take
delivery of Louisiana after he had extorted from the Spanish Govern¬
ment a retrocession of the title deeds, President Jefferson would not have
found the purchase so easy to negotiate. This British benefaction to the
United States had been incidental and undesigned; but, after the close
of the Anglo-American War of a.d. 1812-14 and the final overthrow of
Napoleon at Waterloo, it had become a standing rule of British policy
that Great Britain should keep clear of Continental European entangle¬
ments inside her naval cordon and should at the same time keep on good
terms, outside it, with the United States, which, in the nineteenth
century, was the only naval Power in the World that could have threat¬
ened Great Britain’s strategic position from the rear; and in these
circumstances the maintenance of Canada’s political association with the
United Kingdom had not, during the century ending in a.d. 19x4,
threatened to entangle North America in European conflicts.

Meanwhile, during the same century ending in A.D. 1914, a United
States who had thus escaped from European political entanglements
had been able still to draw on European economic resources—both on
European population in the shape of immigrants and on European
capital in the shape of loans transferred through the importation of

6 3 z HEROIC AGES

European manufactures—to assist her in pushing forward her western
frontier of effective occupation and settlement from the line of the
Appalachians and the Allcghanies, along which it had run in A.D. 1763,
right across North America to the Pacific Coast within little more than
125 years. During the same period the effectiveness of Western eco¬
nomic resources—whether imported from Europe or produced in North
America itself—had been vastly enhanced by the Industrial Revolution
in Technolog)', which had given Western Man an unprecedented com¬
mand over the rest of terrestrial creation, human and non-human alike.

In these nineteenth-century circumstances the conquest of North
America by the people of the United States, impressive though it had
been, could not be regarded as an inexplicable miracle. The remarkable
feature in the story was not that the American people should have won
the West, but that their puissant westward advance should have been
checked, even temporarily, by any section of the pre-Columbian popula¬
tion of North America whose habitat had lain athwart the pioneers’
path. The distinction of having made this exceptional and remarkable
stand belonged to the Plains Indians.

'The Plains Indians constituted for a much longer time than we realise
the most effectual barrier ever set up by a native American popula¬
tion against European invaders in a temperate zone. For two and a half
centuries they maintained themselves with great fortitude against the
Spanish, English, French, Mexican, Texan, and American invaders, with¬
standing missionaries, whisky, disease, gunpowder, and lead.’ 1

It was not, perhaps, so surprising that the Plains Indians should have
maintained themselves from a.d. 1535 to a.d. 1848 against the Spaniards
and their Mexican successors; for, apart from the notable invention of
firearms, the equipment of Early Modern Western Man—particularly in
means of transportation, which were of vital importance on the Great
Plains—was not more efficient than the equipment of the Romans had
been; and the epigoni of the Spanish conquerors of Mexico were more
backward in their technology than most of their contemporaries in other
parts of an expanded Western World. 2 It was more noteworthy that for
more than fifty years—from about a.d. 1821 till the eighteen-seventies—
the eastern edge of the Great Plains should have set a limit to the west¬
ward advance of the agricultural frontier of the United States.

Between a.d. 1763, when French rule had been eliminated from the
Mississippi Basin, and a.d. 1821, when Missouri had been admitted to
statehood in the United States, the westward-flowing tide of American
agricultural settlement, when once it had gathered sufficient head to
force its way over the barrier of the Appalachian Mountains, had found
no halting place at the line of the River Mississippi, which had been the
western political frontier of the United States for the first twenty years
(a.d. 1783-1803) after the end of the Revolutionary War. The Missis¬
sippi, like the Rhine and the Danube, had indeed been designed by
Nature to serve human purposes not as a limes but as an artery of inland

* Webb, W. P.: The Great Plaim (New York 1911, Ginn), p. 48. The quotations from
this book have been made with the permission of the author and the publishers.

1 See the example noticed in III. iii. 136, n. x.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 633
water communications, and the advancing host of migrant farmers had
taken the passage of the great river in its stride. 1 Missouri had been
settled between a . d . 1815 and a . d . 1819, and the town of Independence,
near the north-western corner of the new state, had been founded in
a . d . 1827.* At the western boundary of Missouri, however, the pioneers
of an agricultural civilization had reached a limit that, in contrast to the
Western Waters which had floated them on their way by providing them
with a ready-made means of transportation, proved to be a really for¬
midable obstacle to their farther westward progress. They had reached
the end of the timbered country and the beginning of a treeless steppe ; 3
and at this line their advance was checked.

During the half-century following the year a.d. 1821, in which Mis¬
souri was admitted to statehood, the American farmers and planters
completed their occupation of the timbered country in the Mississippi
Basin by bringing under cultivation Arkansas, Eastern Texas, Wiscon¬
sin, and Eastern Minnesota; and within the same period they also
brought under cultivation the Great Eastern Bay of the treeless prairie,
which penetrated the timbered country in a salient extending eastwards
across Iowa and over the greater part of Illinois. 4 During the second
half of the period they began to nibble at the fringe of the Great Plains
themselves in Kansas; but the American pioneers on the Great Plains
were not the farmers; they were the cattlemen who made their first drive
northward from the south-western corner of Texas to the Missourian
section of the borderline between woodland and prairie in a.d. i 866 ; 5 it
was not till the eighteen-seventies that the American farmers began to
conquer the Great Plains for the plough on the grand scale; the resis¬
tance of the Plains Indians was not completely overcome till a.d. 1876;
and in that year Chief Sitting Bull’s war-band of Sioux, hardly more
than four months before their surrender on the 31st October, inflicted
on the United States Army the most severe reverse that it ever suffered
at Indian hands when, on the 25th June, they wiped out Custer’s attack¬
ing force of 265 men. 6

What is the explanation of these exceptional powers of resistance—
displayed by the Great Plains and their pre-Columbian human occupants
—to which the history of the United States as well as Mexico bears
witness ? The prime cause is to be found in the physical intractability
of the terrain itself to cultivation by a sedentary' society not yet equipped
with the appropriate tools that were eventually to be forged by a Late

' See Paxson, F. L.: History of the American Frontier, 1763-1S93 (Boston 1924,
Houghton Mifflin), chaps. 21-24. The quotations from this book have been made with
the permission of the publishers.

* Sec Billington, R. A.: Westward Expansion, A History of the American Frontier
(New York 1949, Macmillan), pp. 467 and 468.

J See the map in Webb, op. at., between pp. 4 and 5.

* This salient of the North American prairie was a counterpart of the Great Western
Bay of the Eurasian Steppe—extending, between the southern limit of the Russian
forests and the north shore of the Black Sea, up to the eastern foothills of the Carpathians
—which a southward-flowing tide of Russian peasant pioneers had been bringing under
cultivation since A.D. 1774, simultaneously with the American farmers’ and planters’
westward advance up to the eastern edge of the timberless zone of North America.

» See further pp. 648-9, below.

6 See Billington, R. A.: Westscard Expansion, A History of the American Frontier
(New York 1949, Macmillan), p. 666.

634 HEROIC AGES

Modern Western Industrial Revolution; and a secondary’ cause is to be
found in the mistakes committed by the pioneers of the Western Civiliza¬
tion in dealing with the Plains Indians after these pioneers had made
their first contacts with them. West European Man in North America
duly repeated the classical mistake, examined in the Part of this Study
to which the present Annex attaches, which, on other frontiers between
a civilization and barbarians, had eventually given the barbarians the
victory; and it is not inconceivable that History might have followed the
same course in North America as in the Old World if the southern edge
of the Great Plains, where these impinged on Mexico, had not been
forcibly taken over from Mexico by the United States in a.d. i 846-48 1
and if thereafter the conquest of the Great Plains for agriculture had not
been made possible for the American farmer by the invention and mass-
production of new-fangled tools for dealing with unprecedented agri¬
cultural problems.

In a pre-industrial age of Western history the settlement and cultiva¬
tion of the Great Plains by Spanish encomienderos with their Mexican
peons or by planters from the South-Eastern United States with their
Negro slaves or by farmers from the North-Eastern United States with
their own hands was precluded by the absence of timber and the dearth
of water near the surface. The Spanish explorers who reconnoitred the
Great Plains from both the south-west and the south-east in a.d. 1535-
41, and at least two American explorers who reconnoitred them in the
second decade of the nineteenth century, were unanimous in declaring
that this country was an irreclaimable desert. Hugh M. Brackenridge,
in his Journal of a Voyage up the River Missouri, published in a.d. 1816,
wrote that, from a point six hundred miles above the debouchure of the
Missouri into the Mississippi, the country'

‘becomes more dreary and desert till it reaches the Rocky Mountains, and
can never have any other inhabitants than the few that may exist at certain
stations along the river. ... It combines within its frightful and extensive
territory the Steppes of Tartary and the moving sands of the African
deserts.’*

Thereafter Major Stephen H. Long, in his report on an expedition
into the Plains that he had made in a.d. 1820, committed himself to the
statement that,

‘In regard to this extensive section of country, I do not hesitate in
giving the opinion that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of
course uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture for their
subsistence.’*

A twentieth-century American historian comments that ‘Major Long
not only failed to unlock the secrets of the Far West; he set up a psycho-

• In thus annexing from Mexico the southern extremity of the Great Plains, which
had been under Mexican sovereignty de jure but not de facto, the United States was
doing for Mexico the same unintended and unwelcome yet nonetheless valuable service
that Russia did for Persia when she conquered and annexed Transcospia and Trans-
oxar.ia between a.d. 1863 and a.d. «8S6. While Russia thereby relieved Persia from raids
by Turkmens and Uzbegs, the United States relieved Mexico from raids by Comanches
and Apaches.

1 Quoted by Paxson in op. cit., p. 216.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 635
logical barrier that kept others from disproving his falsehoods’. 1 ‘The
tradition of the Great American Desert was at its height in the decade
between 1850 and i860.’ 2 ‘Until after the Civil War the impression
persisted that the farming frontier could never invade that inhospitable
region.’ 3 Yet, as a later passage in Billington’s book testifies, Bracken-
ridge’s and Long’s appreciation of the Great Plains was not incorrect
in the technological circumstances of the time at which it was made. It
was falsified only when the technique of the Industrial Revolution was
brought to the baffled farmers’ assistance.

'The Plains were opened to pioneers during the eighteen-seventies not
by adventurous trailblazcrs but by inventors toiling over drafting boards,
labourers sweating over whirring machines, and production managers
struggling with the complexities of assembly-lines; for those were the
men who applied the techniques of the Industrial Revolution to the unique
problems of America’s last frontier. Their success made expansion
possible.’*

The inventions that eventually conquered the Great Plains for the
plough were the railroad, barbed wire for fencing in a treeless land¬
scape, machinery for drilling deep wells instead of digging shallow
wells, windmills for raising water from these deep wells automatically in¬
stead of by human muscle-power, and ingenious and complicated new
agricultural implements. 5

‘The Industrial Revolution freed American farmers from Time-
shackles which had bound them since land was first tilled.’ 6

And the tale of this technological triumph is recapitulated in a compari¬
son between two sets of figures.

‘407,000,000 acres were occupied and 189,000,000 improved between a.d.
1607 and a.d. 1870; 430,000,000 acres peopled and 225,000,000 placed
under cultivation between a.d. 1870 and a.d. 1900.’ 7

Meanwhile, between a.d. 1519 and the eighteen-sixties, the pioneers
of the Western Civilization in North America who had reached the edge
of the Great Plains had made, as has been noted already, a classical
mistake which, in the Old World, had repeatedly enabled barbarians to
turn the tables on their assailants; and the same mistake had been com¬
mitted by the Spanish Government in Mexico and by the United States
Government in turn. This mistake had been to allow themselves, when
once they had given provocation to neighbouring primitive societies by
starting an aggressive advance into their country, to be deterred, upon
reaching the edge of an apparently forbidding tract of terrain , 8 from
proceeding with their occupation, in the teeth of this local obstacle,
until their advance had brought them to a natural frontier with no
potential transfrontier barbarians beyond it. In the Old World such
rashly unsustained and inconclusive advances into the domains of the

1 Billington, op. cit., pp. 452-3.

1 Webb, op. cit., p, 159. Cp. pp. 147 152-160.

J Billington, op. at, p. 413. * Ibid., p. 688. Cp. Webb, op. cit., p. 141.

5 See Billington, op. cit., chap. 34; Webb, op. cit., chaps. 7 and 8.

6 Billington, op. cit, p. 695.

7 Ibid., p. 703.

* See p. 36, n. 1, above-

6 3 6

HEROIC AGES

primitive societies had been apt to cost a half-heartedly aggressive
civilization dear. The more catastrophic of the two alternative possible
consequences had been the prompt precipitation of an avalanche of
barbarian counter-invasion; 1 the less immediately disastrous alternative
had been the establishment of an artificial limes along the outer edge of
the intractable terrain ; but in the long run this alternative had been no
less fatal than the other, since the fundamental ‘law’ of the limes had
proved to be that the passage of Time tells in the barbarians’ favour.
This ‘law’ duly asserted itself in North America when Spain and the
United States made successive attempts to establish a permanent artificial
limes along the edge of the Great Plains.

The policy of drawing a would-be permanent artificial times at the
edge of the Great Plains was inaugurated by the Spaniards after a series
of four discouraging reconnaissances from Mexico and Florida into the
heart of North America 2 within the six years a.d. 1535-41. 3 One of the
liabilities of the Mcxic Civilization which its Spanish conquerors had
taken over perforce was a chronic feud between the warlike hunting
tribes on the Plains and the northernmost outposts of a pre-Columbian
sedentary agricultural society. 4 In a.d. 1593, little more than half a cen¬
tury after the Spaniards’ first encounters with the Plains Indians, they
suffered their first serious reverse at their hands. 5 The policy of peaceful

S ietration and conversion through the activities of Roman Catholic
ristian missionaries, feebly supported by military force, which proved
successful in dealing both with the sedentary agricultural pueblos in
New Mexico 6 and with the primitive food-gathering tribes in California,
was of no avail with the Plains Indians. A mission planted on the San
Saba River, in the Apache country, in a.d. 1757 was wiped out by the
Apaches in a.d. 1758. 7

The Spanish authorities’ reaction to this disaster was to adopt, in a.d.
1772, a recommendation, made by the Marquess de Rub! after an
official inspection of the frontier zone in a.d. 1766-7, that, in order to
set limits to the raids of the Plains Indians into New Spain, a limes, in
the form of a chain of fifteen forts, should be drawn from coast to coast
along a line which—everywhere except in its easternmost sector, where
it was drawn through San Antonio, Texas, to Bahia del Espiritu Santo
on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico—ran to the south-west of the Rio
Grande, well within the future frontier between Mexico and the United
States that was to be established by the peace settlement of a.d. 1848
and the Gadsden Purchase of a . d . 1853.® When this Augustan policy

* See p. 12, above. Instances of this historical phenomenon have been noted in V.
v. 209, n. 3.

2 Brief accounts of the expeditions of Cabeza de Vaca, Marcos de Niza, Coronado,
and dc Soto will be found in Webb, op. cit., pp. 95-114.

J These four Spanish incursions overland, like the five Norse incursions from Green¬
land into the north-eastern fringes of Continental North America (see II. ii. 292-3),
were all made on the morrow of the original settlement and were never thereafter
followed up. The Norse incursions were all made within forty years of the Norse
colonization of Greenland in A.D. 985-fi, the Spanish incursions all within twenty-two
years of Cortes’ landing in Mexico in a.d. 1519.

4 Sec Webb, op. cit., p. 120. s See ibid., p. hi.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 637
likewise proved a failure, the Spanish authorities in a.d. 1777-8 planned,
but never carried out, an assault upon the Apaches, with the assist¬
ance of the Comanches, on the lines of Marcus Aurelius’s attempt—
abandoned after his death by Commodus—to subjugate, and incorporate
into the Roman Empire, the domains of the Quadi and Marcomanni
beyond the Augustan limes along the middle course of the Danube. 1

'One would judge that, with experience, the task of conquest and
occupation would grow lighter; but, on the contrary, it became heavier,
and eventually impossible. . . . 2

‘As late as a.d. 1842, George W. Kendall, a member of the Santa F6
expedition, records that, as far south as Durango, the miserable in¬
habitants remained within their walled towns out of fear of the raiding
Apaches. At the end of the Spanish regime the Plains Indians were more
powerful, far richer, and in control of more territory than they were at
the beginning of it. The problem of subduing them had to be solved by
another race.’ 1

Indeed, in the light of the usual denouement in the histories of anti-
barbarian limites, it does not seem fanciful to imagine that, if the United
States had not forcibly taken the problem out of Mexican hands in A.D.
1846-8, the year a.d. 1952 might have seen Mexico being ruled by the
descendants of Apache and Comanche barbarian conquistadores , since
it is hard to discern any indigenous social force within Mexico itself
which would have been powerful enough to keep these now formidable
transfronticr barbarians at bay after the fall, in a.d. 1820, of a Spanish
Viccroyalty of New Spain that had provided the Mexic World with its
universal state.

How was it that, in the course of the three centuries of Spanish rule
over the Mexic World, the Plains Indians had become a serious danger
to the sedentary society whose domain adjoined the southern edge of
theirs, instead of remaining the mere nuisance to the north-westernmost
Mexic agricultural pueblos that they had been before the Spaniards’
advent ? The answer to this question is that these barbarians in this one
section of North America had rendered themselves formidable by the
means by which so many of their counterparts in the Old World had
made their fortunes. They had adopted one of the weapons introduced
by their assailants and had adapted this weapon to their own terrain
with a local efficiency which the wardens of the intrusive civilization’s
times had proved unable to emulate. The Spanish authorities’ task on
the frontier of the Mexic World over against the Great Plains had become
‘eventually impossible owing to the fact that the Indians learned to use
horses’; 4 and, in the chapter of the present Study to which this Annex
attaches, 5 we have observed 6 that this was a repetition, in North America,
of the Arab barbarian Nomads’ adoption of the same animate weapon,
on the eve of the Primitive Muslim Arab conquests, from the civiliza¬
tions occupying the adjoining 'Fertile Crescent’; of the Berber bar¬
barian Nomads’ previous adoption of the camel from Arabia via Egypt;
and of the Arya barbarian Nomads’ earlier adoption of the chariot from

1 See V. v. 593. 1 Webb, op. cit., p. 98.

* Ibid., p. 138. « Ibid., p. 98.

* Sec pp. 15-19. above. 6 On pp. 17-18, above.

638 HEROIC AGES

the Sumeric World on the eve of their descent upon the Indus Basin
and South-West Asia in the eighteenth or seventeenth century B.C.

In order to appreciate the revolutionary increase in the Plains Indians’
power which was the consequence of their acquisition of the horse from
Spanish trespassers on the southern fringe of their domain, it must be
borne in mind that the Great Plains were a North American equivalent
of the Great Eurasian Steppe. The North American prairie extended
north-north-westwards, in the same general direction as the Rocky
Mountains which bounded it on the west, from the north coast of the
Gulf of Mexico, between the east bank of the Lower Rio Grande and
the western limit of the timbered eastern half of Texas, right into the
southern sections of what were eventually to be the two Canadian
provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan; and this huge expanse of open
grass-land shared with the Eurasian and Afrasian steppes the property
of having a higher social ‘conductivity’ than any other physical medium
of human intercourse except the Sea. Before the introduction of the
horse, this conductivity of the prairie had made it possible for eleven
Nomad hunting tribes' to make their living there, but at the same time
the poverty of their prc-cquine equipment had set narrow limits to their
exploitation of the prairie’s latent resources for human purposes.

The Plains Indians might never have been able to make themselves
at home on the Plains at all if, in a pre-Columbian Age, the conductivity
of the Plains had not propagated two implements all over the Plains
when once the diffusion of these implements had carried them to the
Plains’ north-western edge. One of these instruments was a domesti¬
cated animal: the sled-dog, 2 presumably borrowed originally from the
Esquimaux, which had provided the Plains Indians with a means of
transportation. The other implement was the composite bow: s a potent
weapon which had presumably come to the North American Plains from
as far afield as the Great Eurasian Steppe, where it had been one of the
characteristic weapons of the Eurasian Nomad herdsmen. The posses¬
sion of these two implements had enabled the eleven tribes to make a
living on the Great Plains by hunting the two great herds of buffalo with
which they shared this habitat; but, while the composite bow was an
effective weapon for warfare as well as for hunting, the dog-sled, trans¬
ferred to a grass-surface from an ice-surface, was an inadequate means
of transportation. In the horse, which spread over the Plains from the
south-east as the sled-dog and the composite bow had spread over them
from the north-west, 4 the Plains Indians suddenly acquired a means of
transportation that was ideal for their habitat, and, in the act, they as
suddenly became for the first time fully masters of the prairie for the
twin purposes of hunting the buffalo and making war on their fellow men.

‘The student of social origins and institutions would like to put his
finger on the exact spot where the Spanish explorer’s horses (mares and
stallions, for gelding was not then practised) broke their tethers and rushed
away into the wild country. Perhaps the horses were stampeded by Indians

« See the maps in Webb, op. cit., pp. so and 51.

2 See Webb, op. cit., pp. 52 and 57.

J Sec Billington, op. at., p. 410. * See Webb, op. cit., p. 57.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 639

or by herds of buffalo; but it is more than likely that some were set free
because they became too poor or footsore or crippled to be of further use
to their masters. It is not remarkable that horses escaped; but it is remark¬
able that they survived, multiplied, and spread over the region west of the
Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Not only did they spread as beasts of
burden for the Plains Indians, but they grew wild in vast herds, proving
that they had found a natural home. It is generally accepted by anthropo¬
logists that these herds originated from the horses lost or abandoned by
de Soto about A.D. 1 541. Whether they came from de Soto’s horses or from
those of Coronado or from other explorers is not material; we know that
the Kiowa and Missouri Indians were mounted by A.D. 1682; [the Kiowa-
Apachc, by a.d. 1684;]' the Pawnee, by a.d. 1700; the Comanche by A.D.
1714; the Plains Cree and Ankara by a.d. 1738; the Assiniboin, Crow,
Mandan, Snake, and Teton, by a.d. 1742; and the most northern tribe,
the Sarsi, by A.D. 1784.*

‘It was indeed a momentous event when a Plains Indian, half afraid
and uncertain, threw his leg for the first time across the back of a Spanish
horse and found himself borne along over the grassy plain with an case
and speed he had never dreamed possible of attaining.... From that time,
slowly and by degrees, he worked out his technique. . . . His world was
enlarged and beautified, and his courage, never lacking, expanded with
his horizon and his power. God save his enemies!’*

The Plains Indians’ Mexican enemies were saved by falling into the
hands of the Americans instead of the Apaches. In the sweeping annexa¬
tions, made by the United States in a.d. 1848, of vast tracts of juridically
Mexican territory in which Mexican sovereignty had been effective only
at a few widely scattered points, the victorious aggressor Power was
inadvertently taking over responsibility for an anti-barbarian frontier,
along the southern edge of the Great Plains, which the Republic of
Mexico’s predecessor, the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain, had in¬
herited, some three hundred years and more before that date, from the
Aztec builders of a Mexic universal state whose work the Spaniards had
completed. Meanwhile, on the eastern edge of the Great Plains, adjoin¬
ing the wooded eastern section of North America that had been effectively
occupied by American planters and farmers, the United States had
already committed itself to the very policy of establishing a permanent
limes, over against the Plains Indians, which by this time had been dis¬
credited on the southern edge of the Plains by the failure of a corres¬
ponding Spanish experiment there ; 4 and, while this American repetition
of a Spanish mistake was in train, Jefferson Davis capped de Soto’s or
Coronado’s feat of presenting the Plains Indians with the horse that had
once made the fortune of the Arabs by doing his best to endow them
with the further gift of the camel, which had once made the fortune of
the Berbers.*

« Ibid., p. 117. . ,

* Ibid., pp. 56-57. . 1 Ibid., pp. X15-16.

* Accounts of the United States Government a attempt to establish a permanent
limes along the eastern edge of the Great Plains between A.D. 1823 and a. d. 1840, and

of the breakdown <.

op. cit., chaps. 31 _

W. C.: The American inuiun rrvnutr (i~uuu- »y*», m««n _

J A brief account of this entertaining incident will be found in Webb, op. cit, pp.
199-200.

640 HEROIC AGES

Under the influence of the picture of the Plains as an inhospitable
desert which had been given currency, in the course of the first two
decades of the nineteenth century, in a series of reports by American
explorers, culminating in Major Long’s report on his expedition in a.d.
1820,* a proposal had been made in a.d. 1823 by John C. Calhoun, at
that time Secretary of War at Washington, for permanently segregating,
within the political domain of the United States, an area that was still
to be left open for settlement by American farmers from an area that
was henceforth to be reserved for occupation by the Indian peoples.
The dividing line was to be drawn approximately at the ninety-fifth
meridian, which coincided more or less with the borderline between the
eastern woodlands and the western prairie. Indian peoples living east of
this line—including ‘the five civilised nations’ in the South-Eastern
United States—were to be induced or compelled to move to the west of
the line in consideration of their being guaranteed the permanent
possession of new lands there, while the Plains Indians were to be in¬
duced to make room for these Indian newcomers from the East in con¬
sideration of their being guaranteed the permanent occupation of the
rest of their hunting-grounds west of the line. The security of title with
which the Indians of both provenances were thus to be invested was to
be the first step towards reclaiming them for Civilization.

‘The great object to be accomplished,’ wrote President Monroe in
recommending Calhoun’s proposal to Congress on the 27th January,
1825, ‘is the removal of these tribes to the territory designated . . . con¬
veying to each tribe a good title to an adequate portion of land ... by
providing ... a system of internal government . . . and, by the regular
progress of improvement and civilisation, prevent . . . degeneracy.’ 2

This proposal was duly carried out in the course of the next fifteen
years.

‘The approval of Congress was given. A group of treaties made with the
western Indians in a.d. 1823 gave a sort pledge that was followed up
by specific laws of 1828 and 1830, in which the policy of (Indian) colonisa¬
tion was described as an accepted thing. In a.d. 1832 Congress recognised
its responsibility to the (Indian] emigrants and created a Bureau of Indian
Affairs in the War Department, under a Commissioner whose duty was
to care for the Indian wards. Two years later, the great charter of the
frontier Indians was enacted in the Indian Intercourse Act, which for¬
bade any White person, without licence from the Indian Commissioner,
to set foot in the Indian Country... . Schools were promised, to teach the
Indians letters and trades. In some cases blacksmiths and other artisans
were to be maintained by the United States. There was a serious attempt
to carry out the suggestion that, once the tribes had been shifted to their
final place of residence, they must be lifted to a higher scale of civiliza¬
tion by the Government of the United States-By the end of a.d. 1840

most of the tribes had been removed to the frontier, the Indian Country
was solid, and the administrative details of the arrangement were com¬
plete. The American citizen, by his own enactment, no longer possessed
a right to advance his settlements towards the West.’ 3

1 See pp. 634-5, above -
* Paxson, op. cit., pp. 277-8 and 284.

1 Quoted in Paxson, op. cit., p. 277.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 641

The military implications of this would-be permanent political settle¬
ment were clearly recognized. A chain of forts had been built along the
western border of the area already settled by American farmers as early
as a.d. 1816-27.*

‘The Secretary of War in a.d. 1837 recommended "a chain of perma¬
nent fortresses ... and a competent organisation of the militia of the
trontier states as the best means of maintaining the peace. . . . The
commander of the army in the West, General E. P. Gaines, recommended
in a.d. 1838 that the cordon of military posts along the Border be built of
stone, to outlast the century at least. . . . [Actually,] while the Indian
Irontier lasted, the defence of the frontier settlements was entrusted
to moving bodies of United States troops, to a regiment of mounted
dragoons that were enlisted early in the ’thirties, and to the militia.' 1

This policy of freezing the western frontier of American agricultural
settlement along the borderline between the woodlands and the prairie
was maintained for more than thirty years. The first inroad upon it was
made in a.d. 1851, when the Sioux and other Plains Indians were
cajoled by the United States authorities into consenting, in negotiations
conducted that summer at Fort Laramie, to a limitation of their ranges
within the area that had previously been guaranteed to them as their
permanent domain; J and 'in the summer of a.d. 1854 the first land
office in the Indian Country was opened across the Border from Missouri,
to retail to settlers the tribal lands that had been dedicated to perpetual
Indian, use’/ Yet, ‘as late as a.d. 1853, the Commissioner of Indian
Affairs’ had ‘reported that there was no serious encroachment of
squatters upon the lands of his wards west of Iowa and Missouri’; s
and the policy that had been inaugurated by the United States Secretary
of War, J. C. Calhoun, in a.d. 1823 was still being pursued by one of his
successors, Jefferson Davis, in a.d. 1853-7. 6

The first premiss on which Davis founded his policy for the frontier
was the assumption, traditional in the United States since the eighteen-
twenties, that the Great Plains were irreclaimable. He referred to them
as ‘that unpopulated desert... which, I believe, is, the most of it, to be
unpopulated for ever'. 7 From this first premiss it followed that there
could be no question of abandoning President Monroe’s policy of main¬
taining a permanent military frontier between the American planters’
and farmers’ country in the woodlands to the east of the hundredth
meridian and the Indian hunting-tribes’ country on the prairie to the
west of the same line. The technical military innovations which Davis
advocated were all concerned merely with the location of the limes and
the disposition, type, and equipment of the troops by whom it was to be
held. He proposed to replace the existing chain of numerous small and
scattered American military posts, thrown out into the fringe of a prairie
on which the frontier of American agricultural settlement had not
caught up with them, by a small number of strong garrisons that were
to be located much farther to the rear, within the already settled and

1 See ibid., pp. 2x3-14.
3 See ibid., pp. 424-6*

5 Ibid., p. 424.

’ Quoted ii

in Webb, op. cit., p. 198.

* Ibid., pp. 284-5.
4 Ibid., p. 426.

* See Webb,

op. cit., pp. 194-6*

642 HEROIC AGES

cultivated area. The forward zone, from which the existing posts were
to be withdrawn, was to be dominated intermittently by sending out
strong patrolling expeditions into it during the season when there would
be grass there to provide fodder for cavalry horses and baggage animals.

In recording Davis’ proposals, Webb points out' ‘that Davis was
advocating a policy very similar to that proposed by Rubf in his report
advocating a reorganisation of the Spanish policy on the southern
border of the Great Plains’. A student of the frontier policy of the Roman
Empire will discern in Davis’ proposal the familiar transition from
an Augustan policy of holding a single continuous brittle forward line
to a Diocletianic policy of defence in depth through a war of move¬
ment, with provision for more adequate reserves than the Augustan
system had allowed. 1 The inference is that, by a date at which the
United States’ limes along the eastern edge of the Great Plains had
been in existence for some thirty years, the defence, here too, was
beginning to be subjected to a strain through the operation of the ‘law’
that, on a stationary military frontier between a civilization and bar¬
barians, Time tells in the barbarians’ favour; and the increases in both
the cost and the difficulty of maintaining the American limes were, in
fact, the grounds explicitly put forward by Davis himself for the techni¬
cal changes that he was suggesting. He had found that the existing ‘garri¬
sons were small and weak, and the soldiers poorly paid and dispirited’. 3
The inability of troops dispersed among numerous small forward posts
‘to pursue and punish’ offending Indian war-bands, which had been
committing depredations almost under their noses, had ‘tended to bring
into disrepute the power and energy of the United States’. 4

The truth was that, by the eighteen-fifties, the Plains Indians had
made themselves into fighting men whose efficiency was formidable not
merely for a Republic of Mexico, but even for a Power of the contem¬
porary calibre of the United States; for, in mounting the Spaniard’s
horse, the Plains Indian had not left the Scythian's composite bow lying
idle on the ground. He had converted himself not merely into an expert
horseman but into an expert horse-archer in the Parthian style; and the
horse-archer who had thus been reborn in the New World was more
than a match for the dragoon from the West European extremity of the
Old World whose weapon—a pair of horse-pistols—had given the most
recent demonstration of its inefficiency at Waterloo. When, in the
eighteen-twenties, the American pioneers in Eastern Texas came within
close enough range of the western plains to provoke Comanche raids
upon them,

'in most respects the Indian had the best of it. In the first place the Texan
carried at most three shots; the Comanche carried twoscore or more
arrows. It took the Texan a minute to reload his weapon; the Indian could
in that time ride three hundred yards and discharge twenty arrows. The
Texan had to dismount in order to use his rifle effectively at all, and it was
his most reliable weapon; the Indian remained mounted throughout the
combat.’ 3

> Webb, op. cit., p. 196, n. 1. 1 See pp. 26-28, above.

s Webb, op. cit., p. 194. * Jefferson Davis, quoted ibid., p. 195.

» Webb, op. cit., p. 169. Cp. Billington, op. cit., pp. 410 and 652.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 643

An officer of the United States Army, in a book published as late as
a.d. 1866,' still found it necessary to explain to his readers that ‘the
modern schools of military science are but illy suited to carrying on
a warfare with the wild tribes of the Plains’ and that the horse-Indians’
‘tactics are such as to render the old system almost wholly impotent’.

It is true that the Industrial Revolution, which was eventually to
provide the American farmer with the appropriate tools for bringing
the prairie under the plough, first came to the American soldier’s rescue
by providing him with an appropriate weapon for fighting the prairie
Indian horse-archer. The six-shooter revolver invented by Samuel Colt
of Boston was in use among the Texan Rangers before a.d. 184c. 2

‘The six-shooter . . . stands as the first mechanical adaptation made by
'the American people when they emerged from the timber and met a set
of new' needs in the open country of the Great Plains. It enabled the White
Man to fight the Plains Indian on horseback.’ 1

Yet the equipment of American cavalrymen with the revolver was not the
end of the armaments race between the Plains Indian and the West
European invaders of North America which had begun when the Indian
had acquired the Spanish cavalryman’s horse; for the transfer of the
military ascendancy from the Indian to the American horseman, which
was the first effect of the advent of the revolver, was only temporary.

‘The revolver . . . multiplied every soldier by six and produced such
an inspiring moral effect on the troops, and so entirely depressing an
effect on the Indians, that the fights became simply chases—the soldiers
attacking, with perfect surety of success, ten or twenty times their num¬
bers. [But] after some years the Indians began to obtain and use revolvers,
and the fighting became more equal. It remained, however, for the brccch-
loading rifle and metallic cartridges to transform the Plains Indian from
an insignificant, scarcely dangerous, adversary into as magnificent a sol¬
dier as the World can show. Already a perfect horseman, and accustomed
all his life to the use of arms on horseback, all [that] he needed was an
accurate weapon which could be easily and rapidly loaded while at full
speed.’ 4

This passage, recording the personal experience of an American
officer who had himself seen active service on the Indian frontier in the
last chapter of this frontier’s history, brings out the point that, down to
the eve of the date at which the Plains Indians were crushed and cor¬
ralled once for all by their American adversaries, their military efficiency
and prowess continued to increase in a geometrical progression through
their practice of the transfrontier barbarians’ master-art of borrowing
the enemy civilization’s weapons and then turning them to better account
by adapting their use to the nature of a local terrain on which the bar¬
barian is at home while the pioneer of the intrusive civilization is out of
his clement there. The book from which this passage has been quoted
was published in a.d. 1882, some six years after the campaigning season

* Matey, R. B.: Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border (New York 1866, Harper),
pp. 67 ff.. quoted in Webb, op. cit., p. 196, n. 1.

* See Webb, op. cit., p. 173. 1 Webb, op. cit., p. 179.

« Dodge, Colonel R. f.: Our Wild Indians (Hartford, Conn. 1SS2, Worthington), pp.
450-1, quoted in Webb, op. cit., p. 175, n. 2.

644 HEROIC AGES

of a.d. 1876, which had been signalized, in the annals of the warfare
between the United States and the Sioux, both by the final debacle of
this barbarian war-band and by its previous infliction on the United
States Army of the most grievous reverse ever suffered by United States
troops at Indian hands. 1 The explanation of Sitting Bull’s swan-song
victory over Custer is made clear by Colonel Dodge : s

‘That he [the American soldier] can still contend with the Indian on
anything like equal terms is his highest commendation; for the Indian
is his superior in every soldierlike quality except subordination to
discipline and indomitable courage.’

If this verdict on the comparative military qualities of the United
States Army and the Plains Indians in the eighteen-seventies is as just
an appreciation as it would have been, supposing that it had been pro¬
nounced, apropos of the Roman Army and the Goths, by Ammianus
Marcellinus, it does indeed go far towards explaining how it came to
pass that in a.d. 1876 the United States Army suffered, in miniature, a
disaster as deadly as the Roman catastrophe at Adrianople in a.d. 378;
but we have then still to find the explanation of the extreme difference
between the respective sequels to two episodes of military history that
appear to run parallel up to this point. The victory of the Goths at
Adrianople on the 9th August, 378, was the prelude to a sweeping bar¬
barian conquest of half the Roman Empire, whereas the victory of the
Sioux on the Little Big Horn on the 25th June, 1876, was the prelude
to a decisive collapse of the barbarian victors. 3 The explanation of this
diversity in the outcome is not to be found simply in an industrialized
Western Society’s fertility in spawning ever more lethal new-fangled
mechanical weapons, considering that each new weapon of the kind was
successively acquired, and turned to still better account on barbarian
terrain, by the Western Civilization’s Indian opponents on the North
American Great Plains. The ultimate reason why the transfrontier bar¬
barian who had triumphed over the Roman Empire in the Old World
and had worsted the Spanish Empire and its Mexican successor-state in
North America was eventually overwhelmed in North America by the
United States was not because of the superiority of the American people
in mechanical equipment but because of their numbers and, perhaps
even more, their enterprise.

Before the last round in the warfare between the Americans and the
Plains Indians was fought out to a decisive conclusion in the Americans’
favour in the course of the years a.d. 1861-76, the Plains Indians had
been outmanoeuvred in advance through being encircled by their
American assailants, as the Eurasian Nomad herdsmen who were crushed
by the Russians and the Manchus in the course of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries of the Christian Era had previously been encircled
by these two sedentary Powers when the Russian and Manchu outposts
had collided with one another in the seventeenth century in the Amur

1 See Billington, op. tit., p. 666. 3 Quoted in Webb, op. tit., p. 175, n. 2.

J The details of the last convulsions of Indian resistance on the Plains between a.d.
1876 and a.d. 1890 will be found in Billington, op. tit., pp. 666-7. The accompanying
religious phenomena have been noticed in the present study in V. v. 329-32.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 645
Basin. 1 And, like the seventeenth-century Russo-Manchu feat of en¬
circling the Eurasian Nomads, the nineteenth-century American feat of
encircling the North American Plains Indians was achieved with no
better weapons than de Soto’s or Coronado’s, and with no better means
of transportation than Alexander’s, Caesar’s, or Napoleon’s.

Like the contemporary South African pioneers who were trekking
northward across the Orange River into the heart of Africa, the American
pioneers who traversed the Great Plains of North America in the course
of the years a.d. 1821-49 were armed only with non-repeating fire-arms,
and were equipped, at the best, with ‘covered wagons’ of the kind in
which the Goths had made their transit from the Baltic to the Black Sea
coast of the Eurasian Continent in the early centuries of the Christian
Era, and the Philistines’ theirs from the Aegean coast of Anatolia to the
eastern approaches to Egypt in the early years of the twelfth century
B.c. Indeed, the nineteenth-century American pioneers reckoned it a
triumph when they succeeded in finding a way for the passage of these
immcmorially old ‘houses on wheels’ which not only made the journey
physically practicable for children, women, sick persons, and household
goods, as well as for able-bodied men, but also made it possible to protect
the caravans against attack by Indians behind the rampart of a wagon-
lager. 2 In some of the earliest of their treks across the Plains into the
Far West, the American pioneers failed to manceuvre their wagons
through the mountains and were compelled to finish the journey with
pack-horses. In the summer of a.d. 1856 a party of five hundred men,
women, and children actually made their way over the twelve hundred
miles of trail from Iowa City to Salt Lake City pushing a hundred two¬
wheeled hand-cartsP

The trans-Plains pioneers were no doubt eventually assisted in arriv¬
ing at their jumping-off places at the western edge of the eastern
timbered country by the gradual development of mechanical transporta¬
tion, in the shape of river-steamships and railroads, in their rear. Yet the
first sod was not turned for the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad till a.d. 1828, 4 seven years after the first wagon caravans had
made their way across the Plains from Missouri to Santa F6; the Balti¬
more and Ohio Railroad did not reach the Ohio River till a.d. 1852; and
‘it was five years more before there was a continuation west of the
Ohio to Cincinnati and St. Louis’. 1 Thus the trans-Plains West had
already been won by the pioneers before railhead had reached their
jumping-off places on the western border of the State of Missouri at
the eastern edge of the prairie. Work on a transcontinental railroad was
not started till a.d. 1863—when, significantly, the first start was made
at the Far Western end, from west to east, and not from cast to west at
the westernmost railhead in the Mississippi Basin—and the through-
track from coast to coast was not completed till May 1869, in the year
following the campaigning season in which the United States Army had
broken the back of the Plains Indians’ resistance.

» See III. iii. 19. 2 See Billington, op. dt., pp. 463-4 «nd 5*5-

» See ibid., pp. S43-3- „ .,

* See Paxson, op. at., p. 404- * lbld -> P- 4®5-

646 HEROIC AGES

What was it that moved the American people, without waiting for the
weapons and tools that the Industrial Revolution was forging for them,
thus to encircle the Plains Indians by breaking out of the United States
Government’s artificial limes along the western verge of the timbered
country and pushing across the prairie and over the mountains to a
natural frontier at the Pacific coast ? For half a century and more, run-
ning from about a.d. 1820, the American people believed, as unquestion-
ingly as the United States Government, that the Great Plains were
permanently irreclaimable for agriculture. What prompted the people
to reply to the challenge of this apparent barrier across their path by
making a response that, unlike their Government’s response, was posi¬
tive, not negative? While the Government was trying to establish a per¬
manent military frontier along the eastern edge of the Plains, pioneer
American traders, farmers, and miners were pushing their adventurous
way right across the Plains in the hope of finding—not on them, but
beyond them—a fresh land of promise which would equal, and perhaps
surpass, the timbered eastern section of the United States which by this
time they had already colonized.

This daring leap of the American pioneers across the prairie in the
nineteenth century of the Christian Era is reminiscent of the leap across
the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe that was made in the
tenth century by missionaries from the Oxus-Jaxartcs Basin who con¬
verted Great Bulgaria to Islam and by rival missionaries from Con¬
stantinople who converted Russia to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
But the driving force that gave an irresistible impetus to the American
pioneers’ trek across two-thirds of the breadth of the great North
American island from the western edge of the eastern timbered country
all the way to the Pacific coast was not that concern for the salvation of
souls which had previously carried the Jesuit missionaries to California
from Mexico; it was the mounting pressure of an American population,
cast of the times, that was now being reinforced by the rapidly increasing
population of a nineteenth-century W estern Europe.

'The whole population of the United States rose from 9.638,453 in
a.d. 1820 to 17,069,453 in a.d. 1840. Of this increase of almost seven and
a half millions, more than four millions were to be found in the states and
territories west of the Appalachian Mountains. The total western popula¬
tion was about 6,300,000,... and this total was nearly 200 per cent more
than it had been in a.d. 1820. The whole United States increased about
80 per cent in twenty years. The eastern states, even with the help of
their frontier elements, increased only some sixty per cent in the same
period.’ 1

The pressure of this potent head of population mounting up against the
inner face of the United States Government’s times was the force that
catapulted the pioneers—by sheer muscle-power without mechanical
aids—right across the Plains to the western mountains, and, over these,
to the Pacific, between the years a.d. 1821 and 1849.

This abundance of man-power, working together with a contemporary
release of the United States from political and military entanglements
« Paxson, op. cit., pp. 286-7.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 647

overseas, perhaps suffices to explain the contrast between the Americans’
triumphant nineteenth-century response to the challenge of the Great
Plains and the Spaniards’ previous dismal failure. Even after the
Spaniards had established themselves in Texas, on the opposite fringe
of the Great Plains to New Mexico, in a.d. 1716-18, 1

‘if a Spaniard wanted to go from San Antonio [in Texas] to Santa Fd
[in New Mexico], he did not make a direct journey across the Great
Plains: he took the Camino Real, went south to Durango, then turned
west and north and skirted the mountains until he came to Santa Fd. He
went hundreds of miles out of the direct way, thus avoiding the open
Plains country.’ 1

In the event, a trail across the Great Plains to Santa Fd in New Mexico
from the timbered eastern section of North America was opened up,
not from Texas, but from Missouri.

The news that Mexico had thrown off Spanish sovereignty in a.d.
1820 was promptly followed up by the arrival at Santa Fe, in a.d. 1821,
of no fewer than three rival American caravans, racing one another to be
the first in the New Mexican market; 3 and the arrival of a single great
organized American caravan from Independence, Missouri, was an
annual event at Santa Fd during the years a.d. 1S30-44. 4 The American
occupation of Oregon, which had been begun by seamen sailing round
Cape Horn, was confirmed by a north-westward overland trek across the
Great Plains which was first achieved in a.d. 1832 5 and which was con¬
summated in a.d. 1843, when for the first time wagons went all the way. 6
The first overland trek from Kansas to California was made in a.d. 1841, 7
and in a.d. 1844 wagons went all the way on this trail likewise. 8 The
Mormons made their trek from Iowa to Utah, right across the middle
zone of the Plains, in a.d. 1847, and in a.d. 1S49 the 'Gold Rush’ to
California was made overland across the Plains, as well as by the more
circuitous maritime route round Cape Horn. The first coach travelled
from Tipton, Missouri, to San Francisco on the 15th September-ioth
October, 1858. 9

These divers transits of the Great Plains from the Eastern United
States to the Rocky Mountains, and beyond these to the Pacific Coast,
between a.d. 1821 and a.d. 1859, 10 all occurred during a period when, as
we have observed, it was the United States Government’s official policy
to maintain, more Hispanico, a permanent limes along the borderline, cast
of Meridian 98°, between the woodland and the prairie; and there was an
inconsistency between policy and practice that was fraught with eventual
trouble; for these widely ramifying and rapidly multiplying American
trespasses on the hunting grounds of the Plains Indians were provoca¬
tive, and ‘the discovery of gold in the Pike’s Peak country touched off
the inevitable conflict. A hundred thousand miners crossed the Plains in

» See Billington, op. cit, p. 43s.

* Webb, op. tit., p. 86. See the maps in Paxson, op. tit., p. 307, and in Billington,
op. tit., p. 430.

J Sec Billington, op. tit, p. 46a. * See ibid., p. 463.

* See ibid., pp. 513-14. 6 See ibid., pp. 5 * 4 - 6 .

648 HEROIC AGES

1859, elbowed their way into Cheyenne and Arapaho lands, and drove the
Indians from their homes. Resentment bred of those outrages was
infectious’, 1 and the sequel was the series of wars between the Plains
Indians and the United States Army which went on from a.d. 1861 to
a.d. 1876. These wars ended, as we have seen, in the Indians being
defeated on the battlefield and being corralled in reservations; in other
words, they ended in the abandonment, after a forty years’ trial, of the
policy of maintaining a limes at the eastern edge of the Great Plains. But
the denouement which thus liquidated the United States’ limes along
the eastern edge of the prairie was, of course, the opposite of the
classical denouement along artificial limites between civilizations and
barbarians. The catastrophe that eventually turned the limes here into
a superfluous anachronism was not the collapse of the Power that had
established it; it was the crushing of the transfrontier barbarians against
whom it had been designed as a defence for the society that had been
domiciled on the inner side of it.

The United States’ Army’s victory over the Plains Indians in the
warfare of a.d. 1861-76 was conclusive because, by this time, the Army’s
military striking power was being reinforced by the impetus of an ex¬
panding population that was now pressing in upon the Great Plains from
the Far West as well as from the East. The military decision was clinched
on the economic plane by the extermination, between a.d. 1867 and
a.d. 1883, of the game on which the Plains Indians had lived as parasites.
The discovery in a.d. 1871 of a profitable commercial use for buffalo
hides led to an annual slaughter, at the rate of three million victims a
year, over the years 1872-4; the Great Southern Herd was extinct by
a.d. 1878, the Great Northern Herd by a.d. 1883; and by a.d. 1903 no
more than thirty-four living specimens were to be found of a species
which had probably been represented on the Plains by about thirteen
million head before the advent of the rifle. 2 This destruction of the non¬
human, as well as the human, fauna that had tenanted the Great Plains
hitherto left the American people in command of the solitude that they
had made; but the eviction of the previous pre-Columbian tenants had
not settled the question how the new occupants of Transatlantic proven¬
ance would utilize their tardily acquired prairie estate.

The American farmer was not to bring the Great Plains under the
plough till he had followed up the United States’ Army’s conclusive
victory over the Plains Indian Nomad hunting tribes by fighting, on the
morrow of the overt Civil War of a.d. 1861-5, an undeclared civil war
in which the opposing parties were neither the North versus the South
nor the farmer versus the planter but the sedentary tiller of the ground
versus the Nomad keeper of livestock. 3 After farmer Cain had rid him¬
self of hunter Nimrod, 4 he had still to settle accounts with herdsman
Abel; and in North America, as in the Old World, the struggle for life
between Cain and Abel was as savage as the stakes were high. Even
before the Plains Indian and the buffalo had disappeared from the
scene, the contest for possession of the Great Plains of North America

1 Billinffton, op. cit., p. 654. * Sec ibid., pp. 667-8.

3 Gen. iv. 2. * Gen. x. 9.

THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 649
was already being fought out between an American farmer with the
traditions of some six to ten thousand years of husbandry behind him
and an American avatar of the Eurasian Nomad herdsman who, in a.d.
1866, sprang fully armed from the dragon’s-tooth seed which the Civil
War of a.d. 1861-5 had sown in the pastures of the Nueces Valley at the
southernmost extremity of the Great Plains on the Gulf Coast of
Western Texas.

'Phis economic and social conflict between an American Cain, branded
with the mark of his Transatlantic provenance, and an American Abel,
who had made a dramatic second epiphany in a New World, lasted four
times as long as the military Civil War to which it was an epilogue; for,
though the American farmer, with the aid of the American industrialist,
succeeded in making an effective lodgement on the Great Plains in the
course of the eighteen-seventies, the American cowboy had anticipated
him by spreading all over the Plains between a.d. 1866 and a.d. 1880, 1
and it was not till after the speculative boom of a.d. 1880-5 in the cattle
industry had precipitated the crash of a.d. 1885-7, 2 an< * after the
shepherd had made a half-hearted attempt to elbow his way in, 3 that the
farmer found himself relieved of his competitor the herdsman thanks to
Abel's follies and misfortunes rather than to Cain’s own prowess. Even
then, when the farmer’s successive human rivals in the fight for posses¬
sion of the Great Plains of North America had all passed away, Cain’s
acquisition of the disputed territory was by no means assured; for the
Indian hunter, Texan cowboy, and Far Western shepherd had none of
them been such formidable adversaries as Physical Nature was to show
herself to be; and in a.d. 1952 it still remained to be seen whether the
Great Plains would prove permanently amenable to Cain’s high-handed
attempt, with the aid of his offspring Tubal-Cain the artificer,' 4 to
annex these dry grasslands to Ceres’ empire.

Whatever the ultimate destiny of Agriculture on the Great Plains
might be, there was no indication in the sixth decade of the twentieth
century of the Christian Era that Cain’s discomfited pastoral rival was
likely to try conclusions with him here again. In the economic and social
history of the United States the rise and fall of ‘the Cattle Kingdom’
had been no more than a brilliant flash in the trigger-pan ; J yet, for
a student of the geneses of civilizations, the amply recorded history
of an abortive pastoral civilization in North America which had
come and gone between a.d. 1866 and a.d. 1887 was an episode
of surpassing interest in so far as it provided authentic materials
for reconstructing, by analogy, the lost history of the genesis, round
about the turn of the third and second millennia B.C., of a pastoral
civilization on the Eurasian Steppe which had had a subsequent life¬
span of some four thousand years’ duration—in the course of which it
had produced momentous effects on the histories of all its sedentary
neighbours.

In the abortive yet none the less illuminating nineteenth-century

» See Billington, op. dt., p. 679. * See ibid., pp. 683-6.

J See ibid., p. 687. 4 Gen. iv. 22. .

s Accounts of this episode in the history of the United States will be found in
Paxson, op. cit., chap. 56; Webb, op. cit., chap. 6; Billington, op. cit., chap. 33.

B 2S93.vju Y 2

650 HEROIC AGES

North American instance an historian could watch the process by which,
in the Nueces Valley, a composite society, in which human beings,
horses, and cattle were co-operating with one another, under human
management, to make a living off an uncultivated grassland, 1 came into
existence as an economic and social appendage to a neighbouring seden¬
tary agricultural society 2 and then suddenly made what was tantamount
to a declaration of economic and social independence by taking the
whole vast prairie for its realm 3 and claiming to deal, on terms of equality,
with agricultural neighbours to whose economy ‘the Cattle Kingdom’
had previously been subsidiary. This significant passage of history on
the southernmost sector of the borderland between the eastern wood¬
land and the western prairie in North America offered an insight into the
process through which some sector of the borderland between the Desert
and the Sown in the Old World—perhaps the fringes of the oasis of
Anau in Transcaspia—had once given birth to a Nomad pastoral society
which had then proceeded to propagate itself over the entire Eurasian
Steppe—as rapidly, for all that we know, as the nineteenth-century North
American ‘Cattle Kingdom’ spread northwards over the Great Plains
from the Nueces Valley into Canada between a.d. 1866 and a.d. 1880.

Even the fratricidal warfare between Cain and Abel, which had played
so large a part in the histories of the civilizations of the Old World for
not much less than four thousand years, was rekindled in North America
during the twenty years for which the North American ‘Cattle Kingdom’
lasted; and in the New World, as in the Old World, Cain took upon his
head the guilt of playing the part of the aggressor. As recently as a.d.
1865 the farmers of Western Missouri had, at least in sympathy if not in
action, 4 been on the same side as the cowboys of South-Western Texas
in a fierce civil war between a Southern Confederacy and a Union from
which it was striving to secede. Yet in a.d. 1866, when the Texan cow¬
boys, on the first of their annual northward cattle-drives, were bearing
down upon railhead at Scdalia, within the limits of cultivation in
Western Missouri, they were attacked and robbed by ‘embattled farmers’
who, the year before, had been, at least in spirit, their fellow Con¬
federates. 5 ‘Ferocious Plains Indians . . . were to be preferred to the
Missourians’; 6 for the feud between South and North on the political
surface of life did not avail, even in the year following the date of the
Confederacy’s overthrow, to maintain the solidarity of the South against
the disruptive effect of a more ancient feud between Cain and Abel that
had suddenly erupted from a source deep down in the abyss of a Col¬
lective Subconscious Psyche with a violence almost equal to that of the
still more ancient feud between Cain and Nimrod.

1 See III. iii. 10 and 13-14 for this feature in the organization of the Nomad pastoral
societies of the Old World.

1 Cp. III. iii. 10-it. 1 Cp. III. iii. 11-13.

* Missouri was one of the border slave-states that had failed to secede from the Union
in A.D. 1861; but the hearts of perhaps a majority of her population had been on the
Southern side throughout the Civil War of a.d. 1861-5.

* See Webb, op. cit., pp. 217-19; Billington, op. cit., pp. 673-5.

6 Webb, op. cit., p. 219.

VIII. D, ANNEX

‘THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN’ 1

The Heroic Age might have been expected to be a masculine age par
excellence. Docs not the evidence convict it of having been an age of
brute force? And, when force is given a free rein, what chance can
women have of holding their own against the physically dominant sex ?
This a priori logic is confuted by the facts; for the facts show that this
Heroic Age of unbridled adolescent barbarism can challenge comparison
with a Matriarchal Age of primitive agriculture and with a Shorthand-
typist Age of elderly business organization as an age in which women
were in the ascendant. Let us survey these paradoxical facts before we
try to discover the explanation of them.

In the Heroic Age the great catastrophes arc apt to be women’s work,
even when the woman’s role is ostensibly passive. If Alboin’s unsatisfied
desire for Rosamund was the cause of the extermination of the Gepidae,
it is credible that the sacking of Troy was provoked by the satisfaction
of Paris’ desire for Helen, 2 and that Haethcyn brought disaster on him¬
self by carrying off a Swedish Queen. 1 More commonly the women arc
undisguisedly the mischief-makers whose malice drives the heroes into
slaying one another. The legendary quarrel at Worms between Brunhild
and Kriemhild, which eventually discharged itself in the slaughter in
Etzel’s Danubian hall, has its Icelandic counterpart in Hallgerda’s
quarrel with Bergthora which eventually resulted in Njal’s house being
burnt over his head; and, though, in the saga as well as in the epic, the
maker’s art has spun fiction out of fact, we may assume that the fiction
has commended itself because it is true to life. 4 It is indeed all of one
piece with the authentic incidents of the historical quarrel between the
legendary Brunhild’s nobly ferocious namesake 5 and her basely ferocious
enemy Fredegund, which cost the Merovingian successor-state of the
Roman Empire forty years of civil war. 6

* The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women is the title
of a pamphlet published by John Knox in a.d. 1558.

* The legendary Trojan War is presented by Herodotus (Book I, chap. 5) as the first
round in a thenceforth perennial warfare between Hellenes and Orientals which is the

i ilot of his historical drama, while the Rape of Helen, which was the Trojan War’s
rgendary cause, was, according to him (Book I, chaps. 1-4), the fourth of a series of
incidents of the kind, in which Io, Europa, and Medea had been Helen’s predecessors
(see pp. 4 S 4 - 7 , above). The Orientals had started this series of abductions by carrying
off Io, but the Hellenes had been the first to commit the criminal folly of making an
abduction a casus belli. 'To abduct women was a crime, but to take their abduction
seriously enough to insist on reprisals was a folly, since it was obvious that these women
would not have got themselves abducted if they had not so desired’ (Book I, chap. 4). In this
satirical introduction to a work of genius the sophisticated Hellenic historian has wittily
travestied one of the traditional motifs of a post-Minoan ‘heroic’ saga.

J Beowulf, 11 . 2930 ff., cited by H. M. Chadwick in The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1912,
University Press), p. 337.

* See I. i. 449-50.

» An appreciation of the. historical Brunhild’s character will be found in Dill, S.:
Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London 1926, Macmillan), pp. 172-3
and 332-4.

6 For the causes of the quarrel between Brunhild and Fredegund, to which this forty-
years’ war was the sequel, sec p. 654, below.

6 s 2 HEROIC AGES

‘It is well to bear in mind the story of the war between the Angli and
the Warni, a war which owed its origin to Radiger’s repudiation of his
marriage contract with the English King’s sister.... This story comes, not
from a poem, but from the work of a strictly contemporary Roman his¬
torian. ... In the story of Radiger we see how a young princess was able
to gather together a huge army and bring about a sanguinary struggle
between two nations on account of an insult offered to her by a neigh¬
bouring king. Again, Paulus Diaconus 1 states that the war between the
Heruli and the Langobardi was due to the murder of the Herulian King|s
brother by a Langobardic princess. Even if this story is untrue, it is
significant enough that it should obtain credit... . According to Gregory
of Tours 1 the overthrow of the Burgundian kingdom [in Savoy] was due
to the instigation of Hrothhild, who implored her sons to exact vengeance
for the murder of her parents—a case not unlike the Norse version of the
story of Hamdhir and Sdrli. Hildeberht’s invasion of Spain was under¬
taken in answer to messages from his sister Hlothhild, who had been ill-
treated by her husband, the Visigothic King Amalaric.* The dissensions
which eventually brought about the downfall of the Thuringian kingdom
had their origin in the proud and jealous character of Amalaberga, the wife
of Irminfrith. 4 Unless weare prepared to shutoureyesto the plain evidence
of History, we are bound to recognise that the personal feelings of queens
and princesses were among the very strongest of the factors by which the
politics of the Heroic Age were governed. 5

These words ring as true to Macedonian barbarian life in a post-
Achaemenian heroic age as to Teutonic barbarian life in a post-Hellcnic
heroic age.

‘It was in the character and action of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic queens
that the Macedonian blood and tradition showed itself. Both dynasties
exhibit a series of strong-willed, masculine, unscrupulous women of the
same type as those who fought and intrigued for power in the old Mace¬
donian Kingdom. The last Cleopatra of Egypt is the best known to us,
but she was only a type of her class. There was no relegation of queens and
princesses to the obscurity of a harem. They mingled in the political game
as openly as the men. It was in the political sphere, rather than in that
of sensual indulgence, that their passions lay and their crimes found a
motive. Sometimes they went at the head of armies. ... It is only in the
intensity and recklessness with which they pursue their ends that we see
any trace of womanhood left in them.’ 6

The influence of women over men in the Heroic Age had not, of
course, been exhibited solely in the crudely malevolent practice of goad¬
ing the men into fratricidal strife. No women had left deeper marks on
history than Alexander’s mother Olympias and Mu'awiyah’s mother
Hind, and these two viragos had immortali2cd themselves, not by their
recorded deeds of passion and violence, 7 but by their life-long moral

1 See his Hiitoria Lcr.gobardorum, Book I, chap. 20.

* See his Hiitoria Francorum, Book III, chap. 6.

1 See ibid.. Book III, chap. zo. « Sec ibid., Book III, chap. 4.

5 Chadwick, op. cit., pp. 337-8 and 372.

6 Bc ^ n ’ R *’ > ^ he " mut °J Stlrutus (London 1902, Edward Arnold, 2 vols.), vol. ii,

7 Hind is reported to have bitten the liver of her slain enemy Hamzah's corpse on the
battlefield of Uhud (Margoliouth, D. S.: Mohammed and the Rise 0/ Islam (New York
1905, Putnam), p. 306). As for the deeds of Olympias, the charge-sheet was graven on

'THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN’ 653
ascendancy over their redoubtable sons—an ascendancy that was not
impaired by their separation from the husbands to whom these sons had
been born by them. Mu'Swiyah always delighted in speaking of himself
as ‘the son of Hind’, and used to put his mother at the head of the list
when he was enumerating the glories of his family; 1 and Alexander, for
his part, was at heart his mother's son, who had cloven to Olympias when
her estrangement from Philip had come to an open breach—a resolution
of psychological forces which is aptly symbolized in the myth that the
hero was begotten on his mother, not by his legitimate human father,
but by an imperious heavenly sire. 1

After Alexander’s premature death, Olympias entered the arena of
Macedonian cut-throat politics as a principal and duly met her own
death at the hands of as ruthless a criminal as herself in the person of
Cassander. Zcnobia, the widow of Odcnathus prince of Palmyra, and
‘A’ishah, the widow of the Prophet Muhammad and the daughter of his
first khalifah Abu Bakr, embarked on similar ventures without being
made to pay for failure with their lives. Zenobia’s life was spared by her
grim conqueror Aurclian, 3 even after she had repeated her attempt to
carve a Palmyrene Arab barbarian successor-state out of the Roman
Empire; 4 and ‘A’ishah was left in peace by her chivalrous conqueror
‘All after he had defeated her in the one signal victory in his otherwise
disappointing career.* The death of the Selcucid Emperor Antiochus II,
‘the god’, was the signal for his rival widows, a Seleucid Laodice at
Ephesus and a Lagid Berenice at Antioch, to plunge the Asiatic Mace¬
donian successor-state of the Achaemenian Empire into civil strife
which festered into an international war between the Seleucid and
Ptolemaic Powers when Berenice's brother Ptolemy III Euergctes of
Egypt took up arms to avenge his sister’s death after she had been
assassinated through the treachery of a trusted physician who was
secretly in Laodice’s service. 6 The Merovingian successor-state of the
Roman Empire in Gaul was similarly plunged into a civil war—which
dragged on for forty years 7 —by two rival queens who did not wait for

the hearts of two men—Philip and Antipater—who, on this subject, found Alexander
infatuatedly blind.

1 Lammens, S.J., Le Pire H.: Etudes sur le Rtgne du Calife Omaiyade Mo'duia l fT (Paris
1908, Geuthner), p. 69. Cf. eundem: La Mccque a la Veille de IMgire (Bayrut 1924,
Imprimerie Catholiquc), D. 170. The spirit which captivated Hind’s son is exemplified
in ner bearing towards Muhammad at the levie at which she found herself constrained
to declare her allegiance to the conqueror after the capitulation of Mecca (see Mar-
goliouth, op. cit., p. 390), and in her trading venture, financed with money borrowed
from the public treasury by leave of the Caliph ‘Umar, after she had been divorced by
her husband Abu Sufyin (see Lammens, op. cit., pp. 169-70).

* See V. vi. 267-8.

J Aurclian’8 death-warrant was addressed, not to Zcnobia, but to her male academi¬
cian Longinus.

* The successor-state that Zenobia did momentarily establish at her first attempt was
an abortive anticipation of the Ghassanid phylarchy on the Roman Empire’s Syrian
limes, and of Muhammad's oasis-principality of Medina whose capital was transferred
by Mu'Swiyah to Damascus (see 1. i. 74; II. ii. ix; VI. vii. 131 and 208-9).

1 At the Battle of the Camel {commissum 9 Dec., a.d. 656) it was not 'A’ishah, but
her male confederates Talhah and Zubayr, who lost their lives.

6 See Bevan, E. R.: The Home of Seleucus (London 1902, Arnold, 2 vols.), vol. i,

"V&fcl , S.: Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London 1926, Mac¬
millan), p. 174.

654 HEROIC AGES

their husbands to be removed from the arena by assassination before
taking into their own hands the pursuit of a quarrel which for them was
a personal blood-feud.

Fredcgund of Neustria had a grievance against her paramour Chilperic
that was comparable to the grievance of Laodice of Ephesus against her
husband Antiochus—though not indeed a grievance of equal magnitude,
since Laodice was not only Antiochus’s wedded wife but was also his
half-sister, whereas Fredegund was a maidservant who was her master’s
concubine. Chilperic dismissed his concubine Fredegund, besides re¬
pudiating his lawful wife Audovera, in order to contract a politically
advantageous marriage with Galswintha, the daughter of Athanagild
King of the Visigoths and the sister of Chilperic’s brother Sigiberht's wife,
Queen Brunhild of Austrasia. 1 Chilperic’s and Antiochus’s second mar¬
riages had the same motive and the same denouement in the literal sense
of the word. In the sequel in either case the fickle king’s first love pre¬
vailed over raison d'itat, but Galswintha was more unfortunate than
Berenice; for the Lagid queen survived her desertion by her Seleucid
husband, to seize and hold half his inheritance before she met her violent
end, whereas Galswintha’s life was taken by Fredegund with Chilperic’s
connivance—a complicity that was flagrantly advertised when Chilperic
rewarded his former concubine for the murder of his royal sister-in-
law’s royal sister by taking the bondwoman-murderess to wife. The
blood-feud thus ignited between Brunhild and Fredegund was inflamed
when Brunhild’s husband Sigiberht was treacherously stabbed to death
(with poisoned daggers) by agents of Fredegund in the hour of his
victory, while he was being saluted by his brother Chilperic’s Neustrian
warriors as their king, 2 and it was exacerbated still further when, nine
years later, 3 Chilperic in his turn w r as assassinated by an unknown hand
whose stab was never brought home to its instigator. Fredegund died in
her bed ; 4 Brunhild was done to death sixteen years later 3 by Frcdcgund’s
son Chlothar II under tortures 6 which Olympias was spared in her
judicial murder by Cassander.

These militant queens were not always content to leave even the
physical fighting entirely to their male proxies. The fight in which
‘A’ishah’s warriors were worsted by ‘All’s acquired its name ‘the Battle
of the Camel’ from ‘A’ishah’s personal presence on the field in her
curtained camel-howdah ‘wie ein Kriegsheiligtum’ ; 7 and Berenice the
rival of Laodice literally took up arms at a crisis in her fortunes, when
Laodice’s partisans in Antioch had succeeded in kidnapping Berenice’s
infant son, whose claim to the Seleucid crown was the indispensable
cloak under which his mother, like her rival, was fighting for her own
hand.

‘In this extremity Berenice showed the spirit of a lioness. The child was

« For the antithesis between Austrasia and N'custria, see II. ii. 167.

* See Dill.op. cit.,pp. 13-—* o: - 1 —**•-— J —.

of Siegfried’s legend
critically as Queen
Chilperic.

4 \‘ x> ' 5 ^ 7 ;. , . 5 * n „ A - D - 6 »3- 6 See Dill, op. cit., *pp. 211 and 232.

7 Becker, C. H.: Itlamiiudten, vol. i (Leipzig 1924, Quelle and Meyer), p. 101.

‘THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN' 655

believed to have been carried to a certain house. Berenice instantly
mounted a chariot, took in her own hand a spear, and galloped to the spot.
On the way, Caeneus [Laodicc’s leading partisan at Antioch] met her.
The Queen aimed her spear at him. It missed. Nothing daunted, Berenice
followed it with a stone, which brought her enemy down.’ 1

This historical episode lends colour to a legendary scene; for Brunhild
likewise, in her assault-at-arms with Gunther, in which the female
combatant’s hand and the male combatant’s life arc the stakes, follows
up with a stone’s throw a spear-cast that has failed to kill. 2

The evidence that we have now reviewed is perhaps sufficient to
demonstrate that the Heroic Age is the age of opportunity for Goneril
and Regan. Aristotle notices that ‘most of the military and warlike breeds
of men are under the regiment of women’ ; 3 but he does not discover for
us the explanation of these facts that he has observed, for he records this
observation incidentally to a discussion of the reason why gynaecocracy
—‘the regiment of women’—prevailed likewise at Sparta under the
Lycurgcan agdgS in its decadence, and his solution for this problem of
Spartan psychology—a solution that is as convincing as it is acute 4 —is
manifestly inapplicable to ‘the regiment of women’ over barbarian
warriors in the Heroic Age.

To explain this peculiar phenomenon at Sparta, Aristotle puts his
finger on the peculiar severity of the discipline to which the male half of
the Spartiatc community was subjected. As he points out, the authors
and administrators of the agdgi had neglected—or had tried in vain—
to impose on the Spartiatc women a way of life that they had succeeded
in imposing on the men with all too complete a success—with the result
that the Spartiate women were at an advantage, in their dealings with
the men, thanks to their own unrestricted enjoyment of a liberty, and
even a licence, which were rigorously denied to their fathers, brothers,
and husbands. Manifestly this explanation is as inapplicable to the
barbarians as it is convincing apropos of the Spartans; for, in this matter
of libertarianism, the barbarian warrior labours under no handicap
whatsoever vis-d-vts his mother, sister, or wife. As we have already
observed in the chapter to which this Annex attaches, the life of the
barbarian warrior squatting in his moral glum 5 inside a fallen limes is as

1 Be van, op. cit., vol. i, p. 182. Berenice’s presence of mind and physical prowess
did not avail to enable her to recover possession of her child’s body, alive or dead;
but they did avail to win her such a preponderance of popular sympathy among the
citizens of Antioch that the slain Caeneus fellow municipal magistrates, who had been
his accomplices in kidnapping Berenice's child on Laodicc’s behalf, found themselves
constrained to exhibit a child to the people as the infant king.

1 We arc not, of course, suggesting that the assault-at-arms between Brunhild and
Gunther, described in the rlibelungtnhtd, was an historical event. In the legendary Brun¬
hild we have, not a poetic reminiscence of an historical personage, but a poetic trans¬
formation of a goddess into a human heroine. The legendary Brunhild, as her name bears
witness, was originally n war-goddess clad in a coat of mail; and this origin, which is
no longer discernible in the High German Nibelungmlied, is still manifest m the Norse
Volnmgar Saga.

> Aristotle: Politics, Book II, chap, vi, § 6 (1269 B, 24-27)- He notes, as exceptions
to this ‘law’, 'the Celts and others who openly practise and approve homosexuality.’
This subsidiary law of Aristotle’s had been further illustrated, since Aristotle’s own day,
by the mores of the Egyptian MamlQks.

* See the present Study, III. iii. 75.

* See the passage quoted from H. G. Wells in VIII D, on p. 53, n. 2.

656 HEROIC AGES

lawless as the Spartiatc ‘peer’s’ life is regular (so long, at least, as the
Spartiate ‘peer’ is held fast within the cadres of his mess in peace-time
and his unit on active service). The explanation of the ‘regiment’ of
women over the barbarian war-band must therefore lie in some non-
Spartan direction. There are perhaps two lines of explanation, one
sociological and the other psychological.

The sociological explanation is to be found in the fact that the Heroic
Age is a social interregnum in which the traditional habits of Primitive
Life in its latter-day Yin-state ! have been broken up, while no new
‘cake of custom’ had yet been baked by a nascent civilization or nascent
higher religion. In this unusual and ephemeral social situation a tem¬
porary social vacuum is filled by an individualism so absolute that it
overrides even the intrinsic differences in nature between the sexes.
This individualism does, of course, tell against women as well as in their
favour. In the brutal anarchy of the Primitive Muslim Arab heroic age
the normal inferiority of women to men in sheer physical strength did
expose the women to the scourge of outright physical ill-treatment—at
any rate among the Qurayshite lords of creation, whose standard of
behaviour towards women had previously, in the pre-Islamic ‘Days of
Ignorance’, already been conspicuously lower, not only than that of their
sedentary neighbours at Medina, but even than the standard of their
Nomad contemporaries. 2 Again, it can hardly be an accidental coinci¬
dence that the Macedonian, Merovingian, and Primitive Muslim Arab
heroic ages should, all alike, be infamous for the facility with which the
heroes divorced their wives—a wrong which was not righted by the
corresponding facility with which the discarded women were able to
obtain successive husbands. It is all the more remarkable to find this
unbridled individualism bearing, in the political field, fruits hardly
distinguishable from those of a doctrinaire feminism that is altogether
beyond the emotional range and the intellectual horizon of the women
and men of the Heroic Age, 3 and to see these openings for the exercise
of political power presenting themselves to Umayyad Qurayshi prin¬
cesses, 4 as well as to their Macedonian forerunners and their Merovingian
sisters.

‘In the Heroic Age the state appears to have been regarded as little more
than the property of an individual—or rather, perhaps, of a family, which
itself was intimately connected with a number of other families in similar
positions. ... It is worth noticing what is recorded in Beowulf on an
occasion of great emergency. Hygelac, King of the Geatas, lost his life
in the disastrous expedition against the Frisians and left an only son,
Hcardred, who seems to have been scarcely more than a child. Beowulf
escaped from the slaughter; and, on his return, “Hygd offered him the
treasury and the government, the rings and the throne. She trusted not
that her child would be able to hold his patrimony against foreign

1 See II. i. 191-5.

2 See Lnmmens, S.J., Le Pire H.: Etudet sur le Rfgne du Calife Omaiyadt Mo'aicia l 1 ’
(Paris 1908, Geuihner), pp. 314-24-

2 'Le fdminiame, il faut bicn en convenir, ne rcncontrait pas k cette rfpoque dcs
panisana en Arabic, m*mc dans its rang* du beau sexe’ (Lammcns, op. cit., p. 3x6).

4 Sec I.ammcns, op. cit., p. 329. Under the subsequent 'Abbasid rigime, princesses
lost the prestige and power that had been theirs under the Umayyad dispensation.

'THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN’ 657

nations, now that Hygelac was dead.”' There is no reference to any action
on the part of the council or court; but the queen offers the throne to the
late king’s nephew. The whole passage seems to indicate that the throne,
with all its rights, was regarded very much like any ordinary family pro¬
perty. Its disposition is arranged by the family itself, without any notion
of responsibility to others; and the members of the court are not taken
into account any more than the servants in a private household. It may
perhaps be argued that court poets would be apt to exaggerate the power
of the royal family, and consequently that the picture of its authority given
here is misleading. Yet Amalaswintha, who was a contemporary of Hyge¬
lac, appears to have acted on her own authority when she associated Thco-
dahath, the nephew of Thcodric, in the sovereignty with herself after her
son’s death.’ 1

In the legend of a post-Minoan heroic age that was current in an
Hellenic World, the succession of the interloping Pelopidae to the
preceding Persc'id holders of the lordship of Mycenae was traditionally
accounted for, as Thucydides points out,* by the fact that the mother of
the last Perseld king, Eurystheus, was the sister of the first Pelopid king,
Atreus. On the strength of this relationship on the female side, Eurys¬
theus, when he took his departure from Mycenae on a campaign against
Athens from which he was never to return, was reputed to have left his
castle and his kingdom in Atreus’ charge; and the queen was the living
hinge on whom politics turned in the lordship of Ithaca likewise, as the
story is told in the Odyssey.

Though, even according to the unexacting standards of the Heroic
Age, the Cephallenian pallikaria have got shockingly out of hand as
a result of the twenty years’ absence of their lawful king Odysseus, they
have not the audacity to liquidate Odysseus’ lordship by formally reduc¬
ing their lost king’s son and heir, Telemachus, to a station on an equality
with their own, until the lost king’s queen, Penelope, shall have con¬
sented to leave her missing husband’s house in order to marry one of
these lordlings’ own number; and, though it is assumed that, if she does
contract a second marriage, she will return for this purpose to the house
of her father Icarius, to be given away for a second time from there, it
is also assumed that, in the choice of her new husband from among her
xo8 suitors, 4 the last word will lie, not with her father, but with her
herself. ‘Send your mother away and make her marry the man whom
her father chooses and whom she prefers’ is the course that is proposed
to Telemachus by Antinous, parleying as spokesman for all the suitors. 5
The implication seems to be that, so long as the missing king’s living
queen remains mistress of her absent husband’s house, her loyalty to
him—or even merely to his memory, if he should prove to be dead—
effectively preserves the royal prerogative for Odysseus himself, should
he live to return, or for his son Telemachus, should he live to grow to
man’s estate. So long as Penelope can contrive to continue to avoid mak-

* Beowulf, w. 2369 ff.

* Chadwick, H. M.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 19x2, University Press), pp. 336-7

and 371—2. _ * See Thucydides, Book I, chap. 9.

* The number counted up by Telemachus in Odyuey, Book XVI, II. 245-55.

s Odyuey, Book II, 11. 113-14, as translated by E. V. Rieu (London 1945, Penguin
Books), p. 37.

658 HEROIC AGES

ing the operative change in the status quo adhuc, all that her exasperated
suitors can do is to continue, for their part, to exercise an indirect pres¬
sure on their queen and her son by wasting the substance of Odysseus’
estate. They do not venture positively to coerce the queen into marrying
again against her will, notwithstanding their resentful impatience with
her interminable procrastination.

‘The regiment of women’ which these episodes reveal is a feature of
the Heroic Age which fades away as the age itself passes.

‘In the. earliest records [of English history] which wc possess, women of
high rank seem to hold a very important and influential position. This
feature is often ascribed to Southern and Christian influence; but, if so,
it is not a little remarkable that it is much more prominent in the seventh
century than in the eighth or ninth. Thus we find Eanfled, the wife of
Oswio, pursuing a very independent line of action within half a century
of the conversion, while Cynwise, the wife of the heathen king Penda,
would seem to have been acting as regent in her husband’s absence, per¬
haps like Hygd the wife of Hygclac. Above all, Seaxburg, the wife of the
convert Coenwalh, is said to have occupied the throne herself after his
death. Bede’s account of Saint Acthclthryth shows that queens had estates
and retinues of their own; and this custom also must go back to heathen
times, for the first reference that wc have to Bamborough, the chief resi¬
dence of the Northumbrian kings, is the statement that it was given by the
heathen king Aethelfrith to his wife Bebbc.’ 1

The evidence that we have considered so far suggests that 'the regi¬
ment of women’ in the Heroic Age is the product of an individualism
that is temporarily let loose by the breaking of a cake of primitive custom.
But this explanation is still only a negative one. It indicates the favour¬
ableness of the opportunity that the Heroic Age offers to women, without
explaining the women’s success in turning this opportunity to account.
A positive explanation is suggested by the reflection that, in the deadly
game which the criminal barbarian successors of a decadent civilization
have condemned themselves to play against one another, the trump card
is not, after all, the sheer physical force in which the male barbarian has
the advantage over his female opponent as a rule—notwithstanding the
exceptional physical prowess of a legendary Brunhild and an historical
Berenice. If the triumphant barbarians' fratricidal conflicts were really
nothing but trials of physical strength, these jousts would be morally as
innocent as the fights between rival bulls for supremacy in the herd; but
even the triumphant barbarian is branded as being still recognizably
human by the mark of an unexpunged Original Sin; and the fate of
many a barbarian hero—or villain—of legend or history proclaims that,
in a struggle for existence between sinful human beings, even when the
competitors are barbarian-bred, mere physical strength by itself weighs
light in the scales against demonic psychological forces. The winning
cards in the barbarians’ internecine struggle for existence among them¬
selves are the energy, persistence, vindictiveness, and implacability that
spring from a perversion of will-power, and the cunning and treachery
that are hatched by a prostitution of intellectual ability. These are moral

1 Chadwick, H. M.: The Origin of the English Nation (Cambridge 1907, University
Press), pp. 314-15.

‘THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN’ 659
and mental qualities with which sinful Human Nature is as richly en¬
dowed in the female as in the male; and the masculine victims of a
Kriemhild, a Fredegund, a Cleopatra, and a Rosamund might aptly echo
the Pauline cry of distress:

*We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of This World, against
spiritual wickedness in high places.’ 1

The Cleopatra whose wickedness most aptly illustrates this text is not
the notorious daughter of Ptolemy XI Auletes who was the last
Macedonian queen to seize and lose a throne (though in her, too, a for¬
midable vein of barbarian female ruthlessncss lurked beneath a sophisti¬
cated ‘make-up’ of decadent Hellenic charm); the prime virago of the
name 1 is the Cleopatra who was the daughter of Ptolemy VI Philometor
and was by turns the wife of three male incumbents of the throne of the
Selcucidac, 3 Alexander Balas and the brothers Demetrius II Nicdtdr
and Antiochus VII Sidfitcs; for this Cleopatra was the veritable 'Erinys
of the House of Seleucus’. 4

Cleopatra ran amok when her incompetent second husband Demetrius,
turning up again in Syria from a ten years’ captivity (140/139-129 B.c.)
in Parthia, lost no time in demonstrating, by making as deplorable a fail¬
ure of his second reign as he had made of his first, that there was nothing
new about him beyond the outlandish Parthian beard which advertised
that, as a captive of the barbarians, he had not even been able to resist
the temptation to ‘go native’. When the restored Demetrius tried to make
war on his brother-in-law Ptolemy VII Euergetes II and then suffered yet
another resounding military defeat at the hands of a pretender to his
own throne whom Ptolemy had unleashed against him as the simplest
way of settling accounts, Cleopatra took the law into her own hands.
She shut the gates of Ptolcmais in her fugitive husband’s face; and, when
Demetrius was slaughtered on board ship in the harbour of Tyre, by
orders of the governor, in an attempt to take sanctuary in the temple of
Melkart, the suspicion that the governor was acting on Queen Cleopatra’s
instructions was warranted by her unquestioned responsibility for the
subsequent assassination of her elder son Demetrius when he proclaimed
himself his father’s successor without submitting to his mother's tutelage.
Cleopatra thereupon mounted the throne herself with her younger son
Antiochus VIII ‘Grypus’ as her associate; and, when ‘Grypus’ began to
show signs of restiveness in the role of his mother’s puppet, Cleopatra
attempted to make away with him in his turn, and, this time, lost her
own life as the penalty for failing to take his. Her designs had been

* Eph. vi. it.

2 This originally Selcucid family name was introduced into the House of I.Sgus by
Cleopatra, daughter of Antiochus III, who was married to Ptolemy V Epiphanes nr.d
governed the Ptolemaic dominions as regent for her son Ptolemy VI Philometor from
the time of her husband’s death until she died herself, still occupying the seat of power.

J This identification of her through her Selcucid marriages serves to distinguish her
from her mother and namesake, who was the daughter, by the Seleudd Cleopatra, of
Ptolemy V Epiphanes, and who married successively her brothers Ptolemy VI Philo¬
metor and Ptolemy VII Euergetes II, and also from a sister and namesake who, like
their mother, was married to Ptolemy VII Euergetes II and who seized control of the
Ptolemaic Government after Euergetes Il’a death.

* Bevan, E. R.: The House of Seleucus (London 1902, Arnold, 2 vols.), vol. ii, p. 212.

660 HEROIC AGES

betrayed to her intended victim by traitors in her own household; and,
when she offered ‘Grypus’ a poisoned cup, he forced her to drink the
lethal draught herself. 1

Gepid Rosamund died the same death as Macedonian Cleopatra; but
Rosamund’s paramour and fellow murderer Helmechis was less lucky
than Cleopatra’s son and fellow sovereign Antiochus. Helmechis had
received no information in advance to prepare him for the emergency,
and he swallowed half the potion which Rosamund had offered to him
before he realized that it was poisoned—though he did realize this just in
time to make ‘Grypus’s’ effective retort of forcing the rest of the poison
down the viper lady’s throat; so Helmechis merely compelled his
murderess-mistress to share with him a death which overtook him
according to her plan, whereas Antiochus VIII ‘Grypus’ outlived his
mother to spend the rest of his reign, no longer incommoded by her
leading-strings, in fighting an inconclusive civil war with his half-
brother and first-cousin Antiochus IX Cyzicenus, the son whom Cleo¬
patra had born to her third husband, ‘Grypus’s’ uncle, Antiochus VII
SidetSs.

Rosamund’s career, which thus had the same ending as Cleopatra’s, is
an epitome of the Heroic Age which illustrates almost every aspect of
barbarian criminality.

In the first act, as we have noticed, 2 Rosamund undergoes Helen’s
legendary experience of being the passive, and perhaps innocent, cause
of the extermination of a people and the slaying of its king—with the
miserable difference that, in Rosamund’s historical tragedy, the exter¬
minated people are her own countrymen, the slain king is her own
father, and her personal fate is the excruciating one of being taken to wife
by. her father’s slayer, as the prize of a successful act of bloodthirsty
aggression to which the Lombard king Alboin has been prompted by
his unsatisfied desire to possess the Gepid King Cunimund’s daughter.

The second act shows Rosamund, some seven years later, in residence
with her husband in his palace at Verona: the capital of a successor-state
of the Roman Empire in Italy which Alboin has been carving out for
himself since his destruction of Rosamund’s race on a Central European
battlefield. In an inauspicious hour, Alboin, being already the worse for
drink, sends for the drinking-cup which has been made for him out of
Cunimund’s skull, and tells his cup-bearer to offer it to the queen with
an invitation ‘to drink merrily with her father’. Rosamund duly drinks
from the skull without visible demur, and inwardly determines on a
revenge which, in the third act, she duly executes.

In this third act Rosamund incites King Alboin’s foster-brother and
armour-bearer Helmechis to conspire with her for the compassing of
Alboin’s death. She lures her chosen instrument with the offer of her
own hand and the prospect of entering into her husband’s and his
master’s heritage—for it is assumed that the Lombard crown will pass
with its murdered owner’s Gepid queen, even if the queen is, by proxy,

1 This last chapter in Cleopatra’s life is recounted by E. R. Bcvan in The House of
Seleucus (London 1902, Arnold, 2 volt.), voL ii, pp. 230-2.

* On p. 651, above.

‘THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN* 661
the king’s murderess. Helmechis succumbs to his temptress, but makes
the enlistment of Alboin’s chamberlain Peredeo a condition of his own
participation; and, when Rosamund proceeds to approach Peredeo,
the chamberlain rejects the queen’s overture. Peredeo’s negative loyalty
to Alboin puts Rosamund in a quandary. Her murderous machinations
have been brought to a halt, and her own life is now at the mere}' of an
unresponsive confidant; but in this crisis she succeeds in turning the
tables on the chamberlain by a move in which she exhibits a shameless¬
ness which is as remarkable as her presence of mind. Peredeo’s loyalty
to Alboin has not gone to the positive length of leading him to warn the
King of the conspiracy which the chamberlain has refused to join; and,
without giving Peredeo time to have any saving second thoughts,
Rosamund effectively compromises her potential delator by taking the

C ;e of one of her ladies-in-waiting with whom the King’s chamberlain
a liaison, and confronting Peredeo with the foit accompli of having
unwittingly seduced the King’s wife. It is now no longer Rosamund, but
Peredeo, who is in danger of being denounced to Alboin; his peril
ensures his treason, and in the last scene of this third act of the drama—
a scene in which King Alboin, like King Malcolm, is murdered in his
bed—it is apparently Peredeo, not Helmechis, who plays Macbeth’s
part. Perhaps Helmechis has found himself unable to summon up the
hardihood—which assuredly would not have failed Rosamund had she
been cither of her masculine accomplices—to break a twofold tabu by
personally taking the life of a foster-kinsman who is at the same time his
lord. 1

The fourth act shows us Rosamund’s deed of vengeance duly
accomplished, but Helmechis disappointed of the political prize that
was to have been half his reward for lending himself to the execution
of his royal temptress’s criminal plot. The crime has proved too shock¬
ing to be condoned even by barbarian consciences; and, instead of
mounting together the murdered Alboin’s throne, Rosamund and
Helmechis have had to flee together for their lives. They have been given
asylum by the Constantinopolitan viceroy of Italy, who has found it
easier to ship Alboin’s murderers, with Alboin’s treasure in their bag¬
gage, from Verona to the viceroy’s water-girt fastness-capital at Ravenna
than to withstand a living Alboin’s prowess in wresting from the Roman
Empire a recently recovered dominion which it is the viceroy’s duty to
defend. In the astonishing transformation scene now staged in Fortune’s
kaleidoscope the initiative is thrown into the viceroy’s hands, and he
proves himself as brilliant in intrigue as he has been contemptible in
war. The achievement of her revenge has left Rosamund still unsatisfied;
for her vindictiveness has been alloyed with ambition, and her dream
of ruling at Verona with Helmechis as her consort-puppet, which was in
her mind when she offered the wretch her hand in exchange for her first
husband’s death, has been shattered by the Lombards’ disconcerting

« When Alexander did slay his foster-kinsman Cleitus, there was at least only one
tabu violated, since in this case the foster-victim was the King’s retainer, while the King
himself played the foster-murderer’s part; and, besides that, the Macedonian counterpart
of the Lombard crime was committed, not premcditatedly in cold blood, but at a moment
when both men were drunk and when neither of them was compos mentis.

662 HEROIC AGES

squeamishness. To find herself married to Helmechis as her fellow
refugee at Ravenna is a predicament for which she has not bargained;
and the viceroy is as quick to espy and attack the barbarian virago’s
c 6 ti faible as Rosamund herself has been to get Helmechis and Peredeo
into her toils. 'Why not,’ whispers the viceroy to the virago—‘Why not
repeat your exploit of murdering a husband and thereby put yourself
in a position to marry me ? Though unfortunately I cannot reinstate you
in your late husband’s kingdom, which I have failed to prevent his carv¬
ing out and which you have failed to seize for yourself, I can at any rate
make you vicereine of what Alboin has left to me of Roman Italy.’ The
temptress, thus tempted in her turn, readily swallows her tempter’s bait
and thereby meets her death, as has been narrated, in tho process of
carrying out the viceroy’s sly suggestion.

On learning that Rosamund, as well as Helmechis, was dead, the
viceroy must have breathed a sigh of relief, for manifestly a lady who
had successfully made away with two husbands would not have scrupled
to mete the same measure to a third, had she lived to take this into her
head. Lucky Longinus! He had escaped the lady and inherited her
treasure. A Lombard hoard in which the spoils of the Gepidae had been
augmented by the plunder of the richer half of Italy was something
worth having. The unfortunate Gepids’ involuntary contribution could
fairly be booked by the Imperial Auditor-General as interest due on
capital that had been levied by Alboin in Italy without its lawful Roman
owners’ leave. Like the good civil servant that he may well have been,
the viceroy Longinus duly remitted Rosamund’s treasure from Ravenna
to Constantinople, where it was as utterly out of reach of itching bar¬
barian hands as was the treasure of the Nibelungs after Hagen had
sunk it in the Rhine. 1

The ironical or censorious spectator who views the tragedy of
Rosamund from the ivory tower of some place and time far removed
from the moral slum of the Heroic Age—though not on that account
immune from other exhibitions of Original Sin—will be better advised
to apply to the daughter of Cunimund the more charitable verdict that
has been pronounced by a Christian historian on Philometor’s daughter
Cleopatra.

'From her girlhood she had been treated as a thing whose heart did not
come into consideration, a mere piece in the political game. What wonder
that she became a politician whose heart was dead ?’ J

If we ask ourselves whether these women who exercise their ‘mon¬
strous regiment’ in the inferno of the Heroic Age arc heroines or vil-
Iainesses or victims or elusive participants in all three roles, we shall
arrive at no clear-cut answer to our question. Unquestionably, on the
other hand, this tragic moral ambivalence makes them ideal subjects for
poetry; and it is no accident that, in the epic legacy of a post-Minoan
heroic age, one of the favourite genres should have been ‘catalogues of

* The story of Rosamund is recounted by Thomas Hodgkin in Italy and her Invaders,
voLv. Book VI (Oxford 189s, Clarendon Press), pp. 134-40 and 168-73. 0 ° P- «68,
Hodgkin notes that, in the sagas of the Lombards, ‘women had already played a leading
part 1 . 2 Bevan, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 250.

‘THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN* 663
women’ in which the recital of one legendary virago’s crimes and suffer¬
ings called up the legend of another representative of her kind, in an
almost endless chain of poetic reminiscences. 1 The historic women whose
grim lives echo through this poetry would have smiled, with wry
countenances, could they have foreknown that a reminiscence of a
reminiscence would one day evoke A Dream of Fair Women in the
imagination of a Victorian poet. They would have felt decidedly more
at home in the atmosphere of the third scene in the first act of Macbeth.

* The epic formula rj of rj ('or such as was’), by which each link in this tragic chain
was attached to its predecessor, generated the nicknamed HOIAI for catalogues of this
type. The fragments of two collections of the kind—the HOIAI, alias KATAAOIOE,
and the MEiAAAI HOIAI —will be found in Aloisius Reach’s edition of the works of
Hesiod, to whom the authorship of this poetry came to be ascribed (Hetiodi Cartnina
rcccnsuit Aloisius Rzach, editio altera (Leipzig 190S, Teubner), pp. 131-S7). A longer
specimen i* embedded in Odyssey, Book XI, 11 . 215-332.

VIII E (I), ANNEX

OPTICAL ILLUSIONS IN HESIOD’S VISTA
OF HISTORY

In a Dark Age that is pregnant with a new civilization a speculative
mind is both stirred by the quickening of its social environment and
cramped by the cribbcdness of its historical horizon.

This lowness in the degree of historical visibility, with which an
intellectual worker in a Dark Age is condemned to contend, handi¬
capped the superlative genius of Ibn Khaldun in his study of the rises
and falls of empires; for all the empires of which the great Maghribi
historian-philosopher had any substantial knowledge belonged to the
particular—and peculiar—class of empires founded by Nomads. 1 Even
the Baghdadi 'Abbasid and Cordovan Umayyad caliphates were deriva¬
tives of a Damascene Arab Nomad successor-state of the Roman
Empire; and, in Ibn Khaldun’s vista, this antecedent non-Nomadic
universal state was barely visible. The authentic sources of Roman
history were not accessible to the Maghribi scholar; and the inductions
on which he bases his historical ‘laws’ are thus perforce drawn almost
exclusively from the histories of a Caliphate originating in the Primitive
Muslim Arab Vdlkerwanderung and of this Caliphate’s Berber, Arab,
Turkish, and Mongol Nomad successor-states. A similar limitation of
historical outlook betrayed the author of the Hesiodic catalogue of races
into falling a victim to a series of optical illusions.

We have already noticed 2 that Hesiod is fantastically out of his reckon¬
ing in his attempt to take his own generation’s historical bearings. From
his Epimethcan standpoint he has mistaken the expectant darkness
before dawn for an eternal night of unrelieved gloom. 3 We have also
noticed 4 that his vision has played him false even when it has been
directed towards the past age lying nearest to his own. His astigmatism
has diffracted the social interregnum immediately following the dissolu¬
tion of the Minoan Civilization into a mirage of two separate ages—an
Age of Bronze and a subsequent Age of Heroes—which, in reality, are
merely diverse aspects of a single episode of history. But Hesiod’s mental
vision has not only played him this trick of diffracting one age into the
semblance of two; it has also led him into the contrary error of‘telescop¬
ing’ two, or perhaps even three, ages into the semblance of one.

The Race of Gold, as Hesiod depicts it, 5 may be interpreted as stand¬
ing, in the first instance, for 'the thalassocracy of Minos’—the imposing
universal state which is the earliest form in which the Minoan Civiliza¬
tion will have made an enduring mark on the imagination of its Achaean

1 This point has been noticed in III. iii. 24.

1 On pp. 57 and 79-80, above.

> This illusion of an Hellenic poet in the eighth century B.C. has its counterpart in
Western history in the expectation—widely current in Western Christendom at and
after the opening of the eleventh century of the Christian Era—that the end of the World
was at hand (see I. i. 171, n. 1).

♦ In VIII. (i) passim, above. s In Works and Days, 11. 109-26.

HESIOD’S OPTICAL ILLUSIONS 665

barbarian successors whose epic poetry is Hesiod’s Book of Genesis. On
this interpretation the Race of Silver, who are the Golden Men’s epigoni,
will stand for these same Minoan ‘thalassocrats’ in the subsequent
digringolade which results in their being swept away to leave the field to
a barbarian Race of Bronze. The Silver Men’s contemptible combina¬
tion of babyishness with aggressiveness and godlessness accords with
this reading of the passage, while, on the same interpretation, the, at
first sight, surprising meed of honour that is paid to them retrospectively,
after their unceremonious liquidation, is explicable, not as a tribute to
virtues with which the Race of Silver is not credited, but as a protest
against atrocities, perpetrated by an interloping Race of Bronze, which
make the liquidated Silver Men’s viciousness look amiable by com¬
parison.

While this is undoubtedly one component of Hesiod’s picture of the
Race of Gold, it can hardly be the only one; for a vista of a civilization
that sees no farther back than the heyday of its universal state is, of
course, a drastically foreshortened view; and we may guess that, on a
different plane of vision, Hesiod’s races of Gold and Silver cover, be¬
tween them, the whole history of the Minoan Civilization from start to
finish—the Race of Gold standing for a Minoan age of growth, and
the Race of Silver for a Minoan age of disintegration.

On this interpretation, Hesiod’s Race of Gold and Race of Iron,
which, in the poet’s vista, seem to stand out at the two poles of his
graduated scries of morally deteriorating phases of society, prove really
to be two instances of an identical phase, which feels like an age of iron
to a poet born into the growth-phase of the Hellenic Civilization, but
looks golden to him when he is viewing the growth-phase of the alien
and mysterious Minoan Civilization through the kindly mist of a tradi¬
tion that has been mellowed by the passage of the centuries.

Yet the posthumous glitter of the growth-phase and of the Indian
Summer of the Minoan Civilization docs not account for all the elements
in the life of the Race of Gold, as Hesiod describes it. A feature to which
the poet gives prominence 1 is the Golden Men’s effortless enjoyment of
an abundant food-supply which the soil produces for them of its own
accord without exacting from them any agricultural labour; and, though
this may be no more than a naive barbarian observer’s impression of
the mysteriously organized life of an urban population whose industry
commands supplies of food which it has not produced for itself, it may
also be a genuine recollection of a food-gathering phase of human
economy—antecedent to the birth of the Minoan or any other civiliza¬
tion—in which Primitive Man, after his arduous feat of becoming fully
human, had rested for a season from his labours in a static Yin-state. 2
This is the interpretation of the Hesiodic Kpovov fiios that was
current among latter-day Hellenic men of letters—though the like¬
wise Hesiodic myth of Cronos’s overthrow by his usurper-son Zeus 3
looks more like a reminiscence of the replacement of a fallen Minoan

« In Works and Days, II. 116-19.

* See II. i. 192-5 and 290-3, and IV. iv. 585-8.

3 See Theogony, fl. 71-73.

666 HEROIC AGES

‘thalassocracy’ by one of its Achaean barbarian successor-states.’ In an
age in which this food-gathering economy had been observed in the life
by Modern Western anthropologists who had tracked down the last of the
food-gatherers in the fastnesses where they had sought shelter from the
disturbing impact of the parvenu civilizations, these latter-day observers
had been able to ascertain that this regime of casual labour was indeed
a life of relatively low psychological tension by comparison with the
organized and disciplined life of the husbandman, the shepherd, and the
industrial worker; but, just because of this, it had proved not to be a life
of material plenty or comfort.

On this analysis, Hesiod’s Golden Age dissolves into three ages, one
of which turns out to be identical with an Iron Age that is not, after all,
the dead end that Hesiod felt it to be, but is the dayspring that, in retro¬
spect, looks like gold. On the other hand, Hesiod's Bronze Age and
Heroic Age lose their separate identities and melt into a single age for
which Hesiod’s sombre picture of the Iron Age would serve as an apt
description.

* See I. i. 96 and III. iii. 113-14.

IX. B (I), ANNEX

THE RELATIVITY OF THE UNIT OF CLASSI¬
FICATION TO THE OBJECT OF STUDY

The ground on which some twenty-one or twenty-three units have been
treated in this book as so many distinct representatives of a species of
society that we have labelled ‘civilizations’ is our finding that each of
them constitutes, in itself, an intelligible field of study. 1 Whereas the
parochial communities into which most of these civilizations were
articulated at some stages of their histories prove to have shared their
main historical experiences with most of the other parochial communi¬
ties comprised within the same society, so that the history of any single
parochial community is intelligible only in the setting of the history of
the whole society in whose life it has been a participant, the history of
each of these larger social units, the civilizations, proves, by contrast, to
be more or less intelligible in itself, because each civilization, in so far
as it has met with the typical specific experiences of the species of which
it is one representative, will be found to have met with them in circum¬
stances, in places, and at dates that were peculiar to its own history, so
that these episodes can be studied and comprehended in isolation from
the corresponding experiences in the histories of other civilizations.

It is true that, where we have a pair of civilizations—for instance the
Muslim pair or the Christian pair—in which the two sister civilizations
are both affiliated to one and the same antecedent society, each of the
two may prove to have emerged at approximately the same date from
the intervening social interregnum; but, thereafter, even when the two
sister civilizations are conjuring up ‘renaissances’ of elements in the life
of their dead common parent, we shall find 2 that they are each apt to
revive different elements of this common heritage in response to different
challenges, and we have already found that their histories arc apt to
follow equally independent and distinctive courses in other respects.

For example, the main body of the Orthodox Christian Society broke
down, on our interpretation of its history, at a date signalized by the
outbreak of the Great Romano-Bulgarian War of a.d. 977-1019, i.c. at
a date before the Russian offshoot of the Orthodox Christian Society had
yet been planted out. This means that the breakdown of this Russian
Orthodox Christendom, whatever date we may assign to it, must, ex
hypothesis have been later than the date of the breakdown of the main
body of Orthodox Christendom, and must therefore have occurred in
different circumstances, as well as in a different geographical theatre;
and, when we go on to ask ourselves about the breakdown of the sister
Western Christian Civilization, we shall find ourselves unable, on the
historical evidence forthcoming midway through the twentieth century
of the Christian Era, to certify that, by that date, the experience of
breakdown had yet overtaken a long since broken-down Orthodox
Christendom’s Western sister. It was certain, at any rate, in the year

* See 1 . i. 17-50, cited on p. 88, above. 2 In X. ix. x—x 66.

668 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
a.d. 1952 that the Western Society had not yet entered into a universal
state, whereas by that date each of the two Orthodox Christian societies
had not only entered into a universal state of its own but had already
passed out of this again—if we arc right in seeing the universal state of
the main body of Orthodox Christendom in the Ottoman Empire and
the universal state of the Russian offshoot of Orthodox Christendom in
the Muscovite Empire.

If these historical findings are correct, they warrant our practice of
treating our twenty-one or twenty-three units as so many distinct
representatives of one and the same species of society for the purpose of
studying some, at least, of this species’ specific experiences. We have
found, for instance, that this practice has justified itself, by proving to
answer to the historical facts, in our study of the geneses, growths, and
breakdowns of civilizations and in our study of encounters between con¬
temporaries, and we shall find it justifying itself again, on the same
empirical test, when we come to study the renaissances of elements of
the cultures of antecedent civilizations. Moreover, in our study of insti¬
tutions generated in the course of the disintegrations of civilizations, we
have found that each of our units can be treated as an intelligible field in
itself for a study of the universal states established by dominant minori¬
ties 1 and a study of the war-bands mustered by the transfrontier
barbarians. 2 On the other hand we have found that, in studying the
recruitment of internal proletariats and the epiphanies of higher reli¬
gions within their bosom in the histories of the disintegrations of civiliza¬
tions of the second generation, the confines of a single civilization no
longer afford us an intelligible field of study for the purpose here in view.
For this purpose, we have had to expand our historical horizon by taking
cognizance of contacts or encounters between two or more civilizations
that have been one another’s contemporaries.

In finding this we are, of course, simply finding—as we should indeed
have expected a priori —that the range of the intelligible field of historical
study is not the same for all purposes but varies in accordance with the
nature of the object that is being studied in each case. Each different
historical object will be found to have a specific field of its own, with a
specific range that is the optimum for the study of this particular object;
and all that we arc claiming for the twenty-one or twenty-three units
with which we have operated in Parts I-VI and in Part VIII of this
Study, as well as in the present Part IX, and with which we shall operate

K ‘ 1 in Part X, is that these prove to be intelligible fields for the study
e geneses, growths, and breakdowns of civilizations, for the study
of universal states and barbarian war-bands, for the study of encounters
between contemporaries, and for the study of renaissances. We do claim
that, for these purposes, it is both correct and illuminating to treat these
units as so many distinct members of one and the same species of society;
but, in claiming this, we arc not claiming that our units are necessarily
all on a par with one another in other respects.

Supposing, for example, that we were studying, not the experiences
of civilizations, but their heritages from the Past, then manifestly, for
« See VI. vii. 1-379- * Sec pp. 1-87, above.

RELATIVITY OF UNITS OF CLASSIFICATION 669
the purpose of that study, the relation between the three ‘Hellenistic’
Christian civilizations or between the two ‘Syriastic’ Muslim civiliza¬
tions or between the two ‘Sinistic’ Far Eastern civilizations would not
be found to be on a par with the relation between, let us say, a ‘Syriastic’
Iranic Muslim civilization and an ‘Indistic’ Hindu civilization that had
collided with one another, without coalescing, in India. For the particular
purpose of studying heritages, we should begin by sorting out the
mutual relations between our twenty-one or twenty-three units into
two distinct classes: one class of relations in virtue of which the members
of a pair or a trio of societies might be called one another’s 'sisters’, in
virtue of their being affiliated, alike, to one and the same antecedent
civilization, and another class of relations in which the parties were not
linked with one another by any common heritage derived from one
identical predecessor. In studying the heritages of the civilizations of the
third generation, we should have to take account, not only of the antece¬
dent civilizations to which they were affiliated, but also of the churches
that had served them as their chrysalises; and, for this purpose, we might
find ourselves reducing the number of our units in this generation
from eight to two, namely one great society—comprising the three
Christian and the two Muslim civilizations—which had derived its
religious inspiration and acquired its moral ethos mainly from Judaism,
and a second great society, comprising the Hindu Civilization and the
two Far Eastern civilizations, whose religious inspiration and moral
ethos could be traced back in some part to Buddhism. The spiritual
affinity between the Judaistic Muslim hero the Mahdi Muhammad
Ahmad and his adversary the Judaistic Christian hero General Charles
George Gordon would leap to the eye of a Buddhist monk or a Con-
fucian philosopher, while conversely a Muslim or a Christian observer
would perceive the spiritual affinity between an Indistic Hindu sanyasi
and an Indistic Japanese practitioner of the Zen discipline of Mahayan-
ian Buddhism.

These considerations seemed to the writer of this Study to suggest
the answer to a pertinent and trenchant criticism, by Prince Dmitri
Obolensky, of the writer’s classification of the main body of Orthodox
Christendom, the offshoot of Orthodox Christendom in Russia, and the
Western Society as three separate civilizations.

‘The picture we shall have of Byzantium and the Mediaeval West,’
Prince Obolensky writes in his critique of this classification, 'will be of
two different but closely interwoven halves of one Graeco-Roman Christ¬
ian and European civilisation.' Neither half, on this reading, was in any
real sense a self-contained unit or a fully "intelligible field of historical
study”, at least until the fifteenth century. . . . From the eighteenth ccn-

* The same view of the relation between these two Christendoms was expressed by
B. H. Sumner, the late Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, in a letter of the 25th
January, 1051, to the writer of this Study:

‘Where I differ, with great hesitation, from you is in regarding Western Christendom
and Eastern Christendom as [being] sufficiently close to each other to be grouped to¬
gether. I look upon them as, on the whole, one Christendom, or one "West , with two
facets.*

B. H. Sumner’s view is expounded in a paper on ‘Russia and Europe’ in Oxford
Slavonic Papers, vol. ii (Oxford 1951, Clarendon Press), pp. 1-16.—A.J.T.

670 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
tury. . . . Russia’s Byzantine heritage, overlaid with influences from the
contemporary West, ceased to be the primary source of Russian culture,
and the "intelligible field” of Russian history in this period should be
widened to include the greater part of Europe. In any case the realm of
Byzantine Civilisation, which in geographico-cultural terms can, both in
mediaeval and (in] modem times, be largely described as Eastern Europe,
was never a self-contained unit, but should be regarded as an integral
part of European Christendom.’ 1

In so far as Prince Obolensky’s criterion, in this paper, for his classifi¬
cation of civilizations is the presence or absence, in their heritages, of
common legacies from antecedent civilizations, the writer of this Study
would not only agree that, for this purpose, three of the units which, in
this Study, have been distinguished from one another for a different
purpose could and should be treated as so many parts of a single more
comprehensive unit; he would go on to submit that, for the purpose of
classifying societies by their heritages, if the criterion of unity or
separateness is to be their participation or their non-participation in a
dual heritage from both Hellenism on the one hand and Christianity on
the other, then the ambit of Prince Obolensky’s ‘one Graeco-Roman
Christian and European Civilization’ must be extended, as has been
suggested above, to include the present writer’s two Muslim civiliza¬
tions as w-ell—considering that Islam originated as a Christian heresy 2
and that thereafter, in the 'Abbasid Age, Islam followed Christianity’s
example in receiving into itself the heritage of Hellenism in the two
intellectual provinces of Philosophy and Science 5 and worked out for
itself a Hellenistic Islamic theology on the pattern of the Hellenistic
Christian theology previously worked out by the Greek Fathers of the
Christian Church. The Muslims cannot be ruled out of membership in
a society for which the certificate of membership is a participation in
both the Christian and the Hellenic heritage; and, though their inclusion
requires the abandonment of Prince Obolensky’s geographical limitation
of his Graeco-Roman Christian Civilization to the confines of Europe,
this limitation cannot in any case be maintained unless Orthodox
Christendom, as well as Dar-al-Islam, is excluded, considering that the
cradle of the Orthodox Christian Civilization lay on the Asiatic side of
the Black Sea Straits, in Asia Minor. 4 Indeed, even Western Christen¬
dom could hardly be claimed as a product of Europe, considering the
importance, in its life and thought, of the influence of Latin Fathers
whose home was North-West Africa.

On the other hand, for the purposes of studying the geneses, growths,
and breakdowns of civilizations and the histories of universal states,
barbarian war-bands, encounters between contemporaries and renais¬
sances, a unitary Hcllcno-Christian ‘great society’ is not, in the present
writer’s view, an effective or an illuminating unit for the conduct of
intellectual operations. These seven lines of study can be pursued, in his
view, with better chances of success if, for these purposes, an Helleno-

* Obolensky, D.: 'Russia’s Byzantine Heritage’, in Oxjord Slavonic Papers , vol. i
(Oxford 1950, Clarendon Press), pp. 53 and 56.

* See V. v. 230, n. 4, and p. 347, above.

1 See p. 408, with n. 5, above. 4 See I. i. 63—64; II. ii. 79; and p. 726-7, below.

RELATIVITY OF UNITS OF CLASSIFICATION 67x
Christian monolith is dissected into five separate civilizations. These
smaller units seemed to the writer to be indicated for these purposes
because an empirical inquiry showed—so it appeared to him—that, in so
far as these experiences had been met with in the histories of these five
units up to date, each unit had had its own separate experience of
genesis, growth, and breakdown, had generated its own separate universal
states and war-bands, had had its own separate encounters with con¬
temporaries, and had evoked its own separate renaissances, whereas he
could not recall a single case in which any of these experiences had been
shared by all the five units in question. So far from that, it appeared to
him that the experience of passing through a universal state, which had
already overtaken the two Orthodox Christian civilizations, had not yet
overtaken the Western Civilization or either of the two Muslim civiliza¬
tions. If this diagnosis was correct, it seemed to follow that the study of
universal states could not be illuminated, but could only be obscured, by
operating with the Helleno-Christian civilizations as the single unit that
would be the key to a successful intellectual operation when the objects
of study were, not experiences, but heritages.

It seemed to the writer that the five smaller units were decidedly more
efficient keys than the single monolithic unit when the object of study
was the historical phenomenon of encounters in the Space-dimension
between civilizations that were contemporary with one another. The
frequency and intimacy of the encounters between the three non-
Muslim Helleno-Christian societies had been taken by Prince Obolensky
as a sign that in truth these were, not three societies, but one society. In
the second of the two passages quoted above he adduces the penetration
of Russia by cultural influences radiating from the Modern West as
evidence that, in this chapter of history at least, Russia and the West
ought to be regarded as being provinces of one single cultural realm, and
in the sequel to the first passage of the two he similarly adduces the
penetration of a Medieval Western Christendom by cultural influences
radiating from Byzantium as evidence that Byzantium and the Medieval
West ought to be regarded as being ‘two different but closely interwoven
halves of one Graeco-Roman Christian and European civilization.’

‘If,* he continues, ‘we were inclined to doubt the truth of this inter¬
pretation, we have only to think how much will remain unintelligible in
the mediaeval history of Western and Central Europe unless we consider
the Byzantine contributions to its culture: Anglo-Saxon scholarship of the
eighth century, the Carolingian art of the ninth, Otto Ill’s restoration of
the Roman Empire, the growth of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, the
cultural aftermath of the Crusades, the Italian Renaissance, these and
other important events of European history cannot be understood without
reference to Eastern Europe. The Basilica of St. Mark in Venice, the Art
of Giotto and El Greco, are these not eloquent signs of how much the
Western World owed to the genius of Byzantium?’ 1

Indisputably they are; but are they not also signs that the body social
which was the recipient of this cultural radiation was a separate and
a different entity from the body by which the radiation was emitted ?

• Obolensky, op. cit., p. 53.

672 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

For, when we turn our attention from the impact of Byzantium on the
Medieval West to the impact of the Modern West on its contemporaries,
we find parallels to all the phenomena cited by Prince Obolensky from
the history of the encounter between Byzantium and the Medieval West
in the relations between the Modern West and three Buddhaistic
societies—the Hindu, the Far Eastern in China, and the Far Eastern in
Korea and Japan—which neither Prince Obolensky nor any other
student of history would be likely to classify, in virtue of these relations,
as being so many subdivisions of a single all-embracing civilization in
which the Western Civilization was likewise to be reckoned as being
included.

The inspiration of eighth-century Anglo-Saxon scholarship and ninth-
century Carolingian art by the genius of Byzantium has its counterpart
in the inspiration of nineteenth-century Bengali scholarship and
twentieth-century Bengali art by the genius of the Modern West. Otto
Ill’s restoration of the Roman Empire in Byzantine dress has its counter¬
part in the restoration of the Mughal Raj in Western dress by the British
East India Company. The establishment of a Norman successor-state
of the East Roman Empire in Sicily is matched by the establishment,
in a.d. 1947, of three Asian successor-states of the British Raj in India:
Pakistan, the Indian Union, and Burma. The cultural aftermath of the
Crusades in Western Christendom has its counterpart in the cultural
aftermath, in the Ottoman Muslim World, of the 'Osmanlis’ likewise
temporarily victorious jihads against the Christendoms (if we may allow
ourselves to cite this one example from the history of the relations
between the Modem West and an Islamic Civilization that shared with
the West its Helleno-Christian heritage). The Byzantine contribution to
the Italian renaissance of an Hellenic literary culture consisted in initiat¬
ing the fifteenth-century Italian humanists into the Greek originals of
Roman copyists’ Latin imitations through which the Italian Humanists
had previously been cultivating Hellenism at second hand; 1 and, in the
history of the impact of the Modern West upon the Hindu World, this
Byzantine sendee to the Italian Humanists has its counterpart in the
initiation of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Hindu pandits
into a scientific study of Sanskrit by the Western pioneers in the science
of the comparative study of the Indo-European languages. The imprint
of Byzantium on the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice has its counterpart
in the imprint of the Italian Renaissance on the Taj Mahall at Agra.
The Byzantine motifs in the art of Giotto and El Greco have their
counterparts in the Western motifs in the art of a twentieth-century
Japan.

On this showing, the evidences of the penetration of Western Christen¬
dom by the radiation of Byzantine cultural influences would seem, in the
present writer’s eyes, to indicate, not that Byzantium and the Medieval
West were provinces of one and the same cultural realm, but rather that
they were two distinct societies whose relations were on a par with those
between a Modern Western Society and its contemporaries in India and
the Far East.

See IV. iv. 27s, n. x, and 363, n. 1; and X. ix. 63.

RELATIVITY OF UNITS OF CLASSIFICATION 673
As the present writer saw it, however, the lesson to be learnt from Prince
Obolensky’s critique of the writer’s classification of civilizations was not
that cither the writer’s own classification or Prince Obolensky’s alter¬
native classification was right or wrong in any absolute or universal
sense. The lesson appeared to be that all such classifications, analyses,
and dissections were keys which were useful in so far as they served the
practical purpose of opening locks. Any one of them would have been
proved to be a genuine key if it did effectively unlock a door; and some
of these keys were good for opening more doors than one; but there did
not seem to be any master key that rendered all its fellow keys superfluous
by unlocking all doors alike; and therefore a resourceful researcher who
had been moved by his curiosity to explore the wonderland of History
would keep on adding to the bunch of keys on his key-ring. Whenever
he ran into a closed door barring the way to further progress in his
intellectual quest, his first recourse would be to try whether any of the
keys already on his ring would turn this next door’s lock; but, if none of
them proved to fit, he would neither try to force the door nor despair of
succeeding in opening it, but would set about casting a new key to fit a
lock that had been proved by experiment to be one of a novel structure.

IX. B (ii) (a) I, ANNEX I

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGICAL COMPETI¬
TION IN THE WESTERNIZATION OF RUSSIA

The part played in the Westernization of Russia by a spontaneous
response to the appeal of the Modem Western culture, as contrasted
with a reluctant capitulation to a recognized necessity of adopting
Western weapons for the purpose of keeping the West at bay, is under¬
lined in the following note by Prince D. Obolensky:

'I would say that to describe the relations between Russia and the
Modem West solely, or mainly, in terms of a technological race between
a rapidly expanding Western military and economic technique and a
Russian resistance to the resultant menace of military conquest or cultural
absorption would be to paint only part of the picture. It is, of course, true
that Peter’s reforms were primarily dictated by military considerations and
by Russia’s need, in order to maintain and improve her military and
political status as a great European power, to "catch up’’ with the econo¬
mically more advanced West. Moreover, I would agree, up to a point, that
the Westernizing movement among the educated minority of the Ortho¬
dox population of Western Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen¬
turies found its raison d'etre in the policy of resisting encroachments of
the West (i.e. of the Roman Catholic Church) by adopting Western wea¬
pons (i.c. from Catholicism and Protestantism). But... I would say that
this Westernising movement, not only in the Ukraine but in Muscovy as
well, was due just as much to a genuine belief held by some of its leaders
in the superiority of the contemporary Western culture, and to their
desire to imitate Western habits and institutions because they were good
in themselves. This is surely true of such outstanding statesmen and
diplomatists of the second half of the seventeenth century as Ordin-
Nashchokin and Prince V. Galitsin, who pursued a policy of ‘‘selective
Westernisation”.’

On the other hand it is surely also true that Peter the Great himself,
spiritual ‘changeling’ though he was in his native Muscovite cultural
environment, was an anima naturaliter Occidentals only in the narrowly
limited sense of having a gift and a passion for the contemporary
Western World’s technology. We have noticed in another context 1 that
this technological approach of his was distasteful to cultivated Westerners
of that age—for example, Bishop Burnet and King William III—who
had not been broken in to a future Industrial Age of Western Civiliza¬
tion in which this exotic young barbarian man of genius was already
living by anticipation; and, though Peter’s genius was so great that he
soon became aware of the necessity of broadening his approach if he
was to succeed in attaining his primary technological objective, his
spontaneous appetite for the non-technological elements in the Western
Civilization always remained comparatively feeble except in so far as it
was whetted by a partially enlightened view of the requirements of a
technological utilitarianism.

» In III. iii. 279.

TECHNOLOGY AND WESTERNIZATION IN RUSSIA 67s

Within the province of Technology, Peter did give proof, as soon as
military necessity allowed, of a spontaneous impulse to extend the range
of his Westernizing policy from the manufacture of Western weapons
to the manufacture of Western non-military commodities.

‘Between a.d. 1695 and a.d. 1709 nearly three-quarters of the new
manufactories were state works, and nearly all of them were designed for
military and naval needs. Between 1710 and 1725 the picture changes, as
the needs of war become rather less absorbing. The new works in his later
years were far less concentrated on military needs; silk, velvet, and ribbon
manufactories were started; china, glass, and brickworks made their
appearance. A number of the state factories were handed over to private
operation, and Peter pressed forward the opening of new works by in¬
dividuals or companies, granting them important exemptions and
privileges’. 1

In thus becoming less exclusively military, Peter’s Westernizing
activities did not, however, become less utilitarian—as is shown by the
persistent utilitarianism of his educational policy; 2 and, though, here
too, the scope of the Westernizing movement in Russia broadened
rapidly after Peter’s death, this subsequent progress of Russia’s cultural
Westernization beyond the limits of military or even civil utilitarian
requirements seems to have been due, not so much to a Russian ‘desire
to imitate Western habits and institutions because they were good in
themselves’, as to the operation of a cultural ‘law’ 1 that, in any encounter
between contemporaries, a single element of a radioactive alien culture,
when once admitted into a recipient society’s body social, tends to draw
in after it other elements of the same alien culture-pattern.

* Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (London 1930, English
Universities Press), p. 166.

* See pp. 554-7, above. 1 Examined on pp. 542-64, above.

IX. B (ii) (a) I, ANNEX II

THE BYZANTINE INSPIRATION OF THE
RUSSIAN POLITICAL ETHOS

In the first draft of the chapter to which this Annex attaches, the writer
assumed that the autocratic regime that was built up in Muscovy in and
after the fourteenth century of the Christian Era had drawn its inspira¬
tion from the Byzantine political tradition; but the comments on this
draft which he received from B. H. Sumner 1 and from Prince D.
Obolensky convinced him that the Muscovite political institutions
which took shape during the period of Mongol ascendancy over Eastern
Russia were, for the most part, home-grown responses to the challenge
of pressure from alien civilizations on two fronts: from a Eurasian
Nomad Society on the south-east and from a Western Christian Society
on the north-west. At the same time the historical evidence still seemed
to the writer to indicate that the political climate of a Russian Orthodox
Christendom, in which a home-grown Muscovite autocracy had found
so favourable an environment for establishing itself, had been pre¬
dominantly Byzantine in its origin.

One consequence of the supremacy which a resuscitated Imperial
Regime had established over the Orthodox Christian Church within the
frontiers of the East Roman Empire in the course of the eighth, ninth,
and tenth centuries of the Christian Era 1 had been that, when a hitherto
independent pagan state received Christianity from the East Roman
Church, it could not place itself under the ecclesiastical authority of the
Oecumenical Patriarch at Constantinople without thereby implicitly
acknowledging the political sovereignty of the Oecumenical Patriarch’s
secular lord and master the East Roman Emperor. 1 This political impli¬
cation of conversion to Orthodox Christianity was, as we have seen, the
cause of a war to the death between the East Roman Empire and a con¬
verted Bulgaria that was responsible for the breakdown of the main
body of Orthodox Christendom in the very generation in which Russia
was entering the Orthodox Christian fold. This juridical consequence of
conversion was in practice much less serious for the Russians than it had
been for the Bulgarians, because Russia, instead of lying, as Bulgaria
lay, on Byzantium’s threshold, was insulated from the East Roman
Empire by the double barrier of the Black Sea and the Eurasian Steppe; 4
and the princes of Kiev and her successor-states, including Muscovy,
appear to have acquiesced, with only a few symptoms of restiveness, in
the East Roman Empire’s pretension to a political supremacy over the
Oecumenical Patriarchate’s Russian ecclesiastical subjects throughout
the period of more than four centuries’ length that elapsed between the
enthronement of Thcdpcmptos, the first Greek Metropolitan of Kiev,
in a.d. 1039 and the extinction of the last remnants of the East Roman
Empire by the 'Osmanlis in a.d. 1453-61. 5

« See VI. vii. 577-9. » Sec IV. iv. 592-612. * See IV. iv. 377.

« Sec p. 152, n. 6, above. s See pp. 399-400, above.

RUSSIA’S BYZANTINE POLITICAL ETHOS 677

The fourtcenth-cenlury rulers of Muscovy’, Prince Obolensky observes
in a note on the present writer’s first draft, ‘continued to acknowledge, at
least in theory, the quasi-religious sovereignty of the Byzantine Emperors,
whose oecumenical authority and legislative power were still recognised
in Russia in the fifteenth century: thus, for example, the Emperor John VI
Cantacuzenus wrote to the Grand Prince Symeon of Moscow (Jungebatur
a . d . 1340-53): “Yes, the Empire of the Romans and the most holy and
great Church of God are, as you have written, the source of all piety and
the school of law and sanctification”. And the Grand Prince Basil II of
Moscow (fungebatur a.d. 1425-62), writing to the Emperor after the Coun¬
cil of Florence, calls him “the pious and holy autocrat of the whole
Universe”.’

Considering that the juridical sovereignty of the East Roman Empire
was thus acknowledged by Russian princes, including the latter-day
Grand Dukes of Muscovy, over a Time-span of more than four centuries,
it is hardly credible that the political 6thos, as distinct from the adminis¬
trative institutions, of a Russian Orthodox Christendom should not
have been deeply influenced by the political 6thos of ‘the Second Rome’;
and W. Wcidlc is surely right in stating, in his brilliant Russie Absente et
Pr (sente ,' that ‘les conceptions politiques investies dans l’ancien Etat
moscovite 6taicnt de provenance byzantine’.

By contrast, die ethos, as well as the institutional structure, of a post-
Muscovitc Petrine autocracy in Russia was manifestly derived from
a contemporary Western World, and the writer would agree with Prince
Obolensky’s view ‘that Peter’s “enlightened autocracy" owes far more
to contemporary Western models than to any Byzantine prototype’, and
that ‘Peter’s ecclesiastical reform, which led to the partial subjection of
the Russian Church to the Imperial power in the eighteenth and nine¬
teenth centuries and to the breakdown of that relationship between the
spiritual and temporal powers which Medieval Russia had inherited
from Byzantium, was based on Western Lutheran, not East Roman,
models.’ The writer of this Study would, however, go on to point out
that this seventeenth-century Western ‘enlightened autocracy’ proves,
on a scrutiny of its origins, not to have been a native Western product;
for its lineage can be traced back through the Late Medieval North
Italian despots to the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, Frederick
II Hohenstaufen; through Frederick to the Norman founders of a
Sicilian and Apulian successor-state of the East Roman Empire; and
through them to the East Roman Empire itself. 2

The writer would also venture to suggest an amendment to Prince
Obolensky’s view that ‘the notion of a purely secular state, regarded as
the source of all authority and legislation and the ultimate object of
men’s loyalty, and in which the clergy are no more than civil servants
whose very spiritual authority is delegated to them by the Government,
would, from the Byzantine view-point, have seemed a strange aberra¬
tion.’ On the writer’s interpretation of the Byzantine Weltanschauung, it
would indeed have seemed to a Byzantine critic strangely naive, in¬
elegant, and impolitic, to the point of being shocking, for an East Roman

1 Pnris X 949 . Gallimard, p. 73. quoted on p. 395, above.

* See III. Hi. 300-x, 305, and 354-63: IV. »v. 198-200; and pp. 363 and 395, above.

678 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
statesman to claim in so many words—as a Western Frederick II and
his eventual Lutheran successors were to stake their claim—that the
Secular Power was the source of spiritual as well as temporal authority;
but assuredly it would also have seemed, in Byzantine eyes, no less
strangely incompetent and irresponsible for the secular Power to refrain
from exercising de facto an effective control over the Church which,
until the East Roman Empire fell on evil days, was always within an
East Roman Emperor’s grasp so long as he took care not to commit the
gross Frankish Frcderician indiscretion of publicly laying claim to this
‘totalitarian’ authority de jure.

IX. B (ii) (a) 2, ANNEX I

THE CONFLICT OF CULTURES IN THE SOUL
OF SOLOM 0 S 1

The career of the conventional Italian poet Dionisio Salomone, who
became the original Greek poet Dhionysios Solomds, is one of the
curiosities of the history of the transmission of culture. His genius found
its opportunity for making its literary fortune thanks to the lucky acci¬
dent of his being the bastard son, by a Zantiot Greek servant-girl,
of a Zantiot landowner—Venetian in culture and origin, though
Orthodox in religion—who, on his death-bed, married Dionisio’s
mother and left Dionisio and his brother handsome shares of his estate.
At the age of ten, Dionisio was sent by his guardian to Italy for his
education, and he remained there for ten years on end (a.d. 1808-18),
first at Venice, then at Cremona, and finally at the Venetian university
of Padua. During these years in Italy he received a thorough schooling
in Italian and Latin literature; made friends with Monti, Manzoni, and
other Italian men of letters; and became a disciple of the Western
Romantic movement. After his return to Zantc he joined an aristocratic
Italianate literary circle there whose parlour-game was the extemporiza¬
tion of sonnets in Italian on some given subject or given set of line-
endings ; and there seemed no reason why he should not end his days in
this conventionally cultivated obscurity.

Solombs found his true metier when, after the outbreak of the Otto¬
man Greek insurrection in a.d. 1821, a Mesolonghiot patriot-publicist,
Spiridhibn Trikodpis, visited him in Zante at his country villa in a.d.
1822 and invited him to become the Dante of a Greek Parnassus. ‘I
don’t know Greek’, Solomos replied, meaning that he had never been
taught the Byzantine ecclesiastical Attic koinS. ‘The language which you
imbibed with your mother’s milk is Greek’, Trikodpis retorted, meaning
that Solombs could have communicated with his low-born mother in
no other tongue than her Zantiot Romaic Greek patois. Thereupon
Solombs sprang into fame by composing in this mother tongue of his, in
Italian metres, Western poetry, first in Byron’s vein and later in Schiller’s.
Thanks to his being a Heptanesian aristocrat, Solombs was a highly
cultivated man who did speak one of the dialects of living Greek as his
mother tongue without knowing the dead language. In the early nine¬
teenth century the Ionian Islands were perhaps the only place in Greek
Orthodox Christendom where this could have happened, and the com¬
position of Western poetry in living Greek—without murdering the
language by trying to transform it into a resurrected Attic—was
Solombs’ inestimably valuable service to a new Greek nation that was
seeking to enter the Western comity.

Solomos’ work suffered, nevertheless, from another form of pedantry
that was likewise inimical to poetry. His method of composing a
Romaic Greek poem was to take Italian notes, expand these into Greek

* See Jenkins, R.: Dionysius Solom 6 s (Cambridge 1940, University Pres*).

6So ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
prose, and then hammer this prose into verse! And in his latter years,
when his mental vigour was on the decline, he relapsed into writing his
poetry in the Italian which, in spite of his Romaic Greek tours deforce,
was, from first to last, his natural medium of literary expression. More¬
over, his invincible native Westernism, which made him so effective a
psychopompus for Greek souls seeking initiation into the Western cul¬
ture, also inhibited him from going out to meet his Ottoman fcllpw
Greek Orthodox Christians in deed as well as in word. When, on the eve
of the fall of Mesol6nghi, just across the water, the cannonade bombarded
his ears in his peaceful villa on Zante, he suffered anguish but did not
seek relief by going to the front in defiance of British regulations; and,
though he lived on for a quarter of a century after a fragment of the
Ottoman Empire had been transformed into a sovereign independent
Kingdom of Greece with its capital at Athens, he preferred to end his
days at Corfu under a British regime.

'In the days when I was young’, wrote the Moreot klepht Koloko-
tr« 5 nis, who had taken refuge on Zante in a.d. 1806, ‘Zante seemed as far
away as the ends of the Earth do now. What America is to us now— that
is pretty well what Zante was to them [i.e. to the fin-de-siecle Moreot
Ottoman Greeks]. When they went to Zante, they called it ‘‘going to the
Western World” (“Phrangid”)’. 1 Solombs’ career testifies that, in the feel¬
ings of a Zantiot aristocrat who was younger than KolokotrtSnis by the
span of a whole generation, an adjacent ex-Ottoman Morca was still the
alter orbis that an adjacent ex-Venetian Zante had been to the Moreot
klepht in days before Solombs was bom.

! Kolokotrdnis, Th: dirfoois ZvpflavToiv rns 'EXXijvik^s QvXfjs, Z770-1S36 (Athens
1889, Esti», 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 49, quoted in V. V. 301.

IX. B (ii) (a) 2, ANNEX II

THE MOREA ON THE EVE OF THE UPRISING
OF A.D. 1821

In a.d. 1821 the eyalet of the Morea did not include the Mani, which,
since a.d. 1776, had been under the jurisdiction, not of the Vail of the
Morea, but of the Qapudan Pasha. On the eve of the uprising of a.d.
1821 the population of the eyalet, excluding the Mani from the reckon¬
ing, is estimated to have been about 400,000, of whom about 360,000
were Greek and Albanian Orthodox Christians and about 40,000 were
Turkish and Albanian Muslims. 1 The Turkish Muslim Moreots were
concentrated in the towns: Corinth, Navplia, Mistra, Monemvasia,
K6ron, Navarino, Arkadhik, Pdtras, Phansiri, Leonddri, Gastuni,
Mddhon. The populations of Ndvplia, Kdron, Modhon, and Navarino
were exclusively Muslim; those of Tripolitsa and Corinth were mixed
in approximately equal proportions. Except in these two last-mentioned
towns, the Christians, where there was a Christian element in the urban
population, lived in separate quarters from the Muslims. 2

At the same date about three-quarters of the agricultural land in the
Morea is estimated to have been in the hands of the Muslim 10 per cent,
of the population, and only one quarter in the hands of the Christian
90 per cent.: 417 per cent, of the land was accounted for by Imperial
Ottoman fiefs, which were, of course, conferred on Muslim fcofccs;
another 25 per cent, was accounted for by Muslim privately owned real
estate; and the remaining 33.3 per cent, by Christian privately owned
real estate. 3 The Muslim, as well as the Christian, estates were, however,
cultivated by Christian tenants and hired labourers, who were at liberty
to change their employers; 4 and the Christians, including labourers and
tenants as well as freeholders, are estimated to have received 87-5 per
cent, of the annual value of the agricultural produce, as against 12-5 per
cent, received by the Muslims, who thus took only about 25 per cent,
more than what would have fallen to them under a strictly proportional
allocation. 3

It will be seen that the economic conditions in the Morea between
a.d. 1715 and a.d. 1821 were not seriously inequitable, and during the
same century the administrative arrangements were remarkably favour¬
able to the Orthodox Christian population or (it would be more accurate
to say) to an Orthodox Christian oligarchy. 6 A system of local self-
government, dating from the preceding period of Venetian occupation,
had been maintained in the Morea after the Ottoman reconquest; and
this self-government was not confined to the communes but extended to
the departments ( Turcice qazos; Graece iirapxuu) and to the province
(Turcid eyalet) as a whole. 7 In each commune the aldermen ( Turcici

« Sec Sakellarios, M. V.: 'H IJeXonoivtjoos Kara -rr.y divrlpav TovoKOKparlav,
171S-1S21 (Athens 1939, Byzantinisch-Neugriechische Jahrbilcher), p. 226.

* Sec ibid., pp. 118-19. J Sec ibid., p. 49. * See ibid., p. 51.

s Sec ibid., p. S 3 * 4 Sec ibid., p. 95. 7 Sec ibid., p. 87.

Z 2

B iSOS.vm

682 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
kh 6 ja-b 3 sh?s; Graece hrjpxtylpovres) were elected annually,' and these in
turn elected the Christian members (Graeci TrpoforujTts) of the council
of the voyevoda of the department, who in their turn, again, collectively
constituted a provincial assembly which elected the two Christian
members (Graed pwpayidv&fs) of the vSlI’s permanent council of five
members including, besides the two Christian deputies, two Muslims
and one Christian dragoman. 2 Moreover, the Greek Orthodox Christian
community in the Morea had two or three political agents (vekils) ac¬
credited to the Porte at Constantinople. 3

‘It can be said that [the departmental Tpoearwres] shared the ad¬
ministrative power with the voyevoda and the judicial with the qadi.
They concentrated so much power in their hands that they were able
fearlessly to hold their own against the Turkish authorities on their own
level. Without their assent, no taxation could be imposed either for local
or for general purposes. They were able to refuse to carry out orders of
the voyevoda’s if they considered these inexpedient. ... If there were
complaints against the voyevoda, and they had the qadi’s concurrence,
they could proceed at once to depose the voyevoda, subject only to refer¬
ring their action retrospectively to the vezir [i.e. the vSli].’ 4

Sakcllarios concludes 5 that ‘the TTpoeorusrcs were the real rulers of their
department’. A Moreot Greek Orthodox Christian born in a.d. 1798 saw
the Ottoman regime in the Morea in its last phase in a more jaundiced
light that does not necessarily give a more objective picture:

'The people appointed on their own initiative a headman (Trpwroytpos) or
crier to carry out the general purposes of the commune and to give notice
in the evening of any corv6e on behalf either of the commune or of the
Government. This notice was cried in the following terms: "Oyez!
Oycz! to-morrow no one is to go about his own private business, because
we are going to do so and so”. Anyone who ignored the notice suffered
for it; his neighbours wrecked his house; and, if he complained to the
Government, the Government paid no attention—unless it were to punish
him for insubordination . . .

'In every large village, and sometimes in small ones, they had an aider-
man ( ytpovras j or two aldermen, according to the size of the population,
who, in collaboration with the priests, assessed the taxes imposed on the
commune among its individual members in accordance with their
means . . .

'Whenever the potentate chose to oppress a town or a family, he would
send a government official straight away and would demand whatever he
chose, and the inhabitants, as I have said, would assess among themselves
what was required, whether it was a money payment or some form of
corv6e, through the agency of the aldermen. The Turks had to allow their
raiyeh all these rights in order that they might prosper and be at the
Turks’ disposal as slaves. On this account they looked after our well¬
being, and everyone among the raiyeh had some important Turk for a
patron, while the whole commune in each town and village likewise had

* See Sakellarios, op. cit., p. 88.

2 See ibid., pp. 89-92; cp. Finlay, G.: A History of Greece from its Conquest by the
Romans to the Present Time, B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864 (Oxford 1877, Clarendon Press,
7 vols.), voL vi, p. 25.

» See Sakellanos, op. cit., p. 94; Finlay, vol. vi, p. 25.

♦ Sakcllarios, op. cit., p. 90.

5 Sec ibid., p. 91.

THE MOREA ON THE EVE OFa.d. 1S21 683

some powerful patron for its own special preservation and protection. In
the large towns, however, things were rather better, owing to their more
advanced development.’ 1

At the same time there was complete religious toleration in the Morea ; 2
by the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the behaviour of
the Moreot Muslims towards their Christian fellow Moreots had be¬
come less harsh, 3 and the Muslim Moreot minority was becoming
assimilated in its culture to the Christian majority. The Moreot Turks
spoke and wrote Greek, and even the 'ulema swore by Christ and by the
Panayfa. 4 The Albanian Muslim Moreots, who were new-comers in a.d.
1715, s were wilder and fiercer than their Turkish coreligionists; yet the
Varduniots in their fastness in the Southern Taygctus and the Laliots
and their neighbours at Phldka in their fastness on Pholoe all bore
Christian as well as Muslim names. 6 Meanwhile the Moreot Greek
Christian oligarchs betrayed their provincialism by continuing to culti¬
vate an Ottoman Muslim style of living which had long since been in
process of being abandoned in favour of a Western style by the sophis¬
ticated metropolitan Phanariots.

‘The khdja-bashy imitated the Turk in everything, including dress,
manners, and household. His notion of living in style was the same as the
Turk’s, and the only difference between them was one of names: for in¬
stance, instead of being called Hasan the khOja-bashy would be called
Y£nni, and instead of going to mosque he would go to church. This was
the only distinction between the two. All the same, the Turk would cut
off the khoja-b5shy’s head whenever he chose, and keep his corpse ex¬
posed for three days in public, with the head placed by the backside as an
additional humiliation, whereas the Turk’s head would be placed under
his aim-pit. From these facts you will be able to judge whether the khbja-
bashy was, or was not, a popularly elected magistrate.’ 7

* Khrysanthopoulos, Ph. FPholAkoa]: Anofiwj/iOveiffiaTa vtpi rijs '.EAAijworiJJ ‘E-. rava-
oraotoji (Athens 1899, Sakeltarios, a vols.), vol. i, pp. 34-37.

* See Sakcllarios, op. cit., p. 120.

3 See ibid., pp. 226-7.

s See ibid., p. 117 .

7 Khrysanth< 5 poulos, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 33-34.

* See ibid., p. 227.

6 See ibid., p. 120, n. 4.

XX. B (u) (a) 3 , ANNEX I

THE PEASANT MAJORITY OF MANKIND AND
THE AGRARIAN POLICY OF THE SOVIET

UNION

To see the problem of a depressed peasantry in India in its true per¬
spective, we must extend our field of observation far beyond the Indian
sub-continent’s limits; for this depressed peasantry in India was one
contingent of an immense host of human beings in the same plight
which, at the time of writing, still accounted for perhaps not less than
three-quarters of the living generation of Mankind 1 and which was
massed, not only in India, but in Indonesia, Indo-China, China, Japan,
the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Egypt, and those superficially Latin¬
ized 'Indian American’ countries, from Mexico to Bolivia inclusive,
which had inherited an indigenous peasantry from the submerged
Central American and Andean civilizations. 1

Could the condition of this vast and widespread rural depressed class
be effectively improved by any orthodox devices of Modern Western
democratic 'social engineering’? To be democratic in the Modern
Western sense of the term, the solution of the problem must be one
which could be introduced by consent, without having to be imposed by
coercion; and it remained to be seen whether the peasantry, in its pre¬
vailing mood of self-assertiveness and expectancy not yet illuminated by
more than a glimmer of intellectual enlightenment, would voluntarily
agree to the things necessary for its economic salvation. The peasantry’s
divers desires at this time seemed, indeed, likely to prove mutually in¬
compatible. The peasants now wanted an improvement in their material
condition, but they also still wanted to go on living their customary life
and using their traditional agricultural technique; and the ambition of

1 According to E. M. Patterson, An Introduction to World Economics (New York 1047,
Macmillan), p. 5, Table I, following and supplementing A. M. Carr-Saunders, World
Population: Past Growths and Present Trends (London 1936, Oxford University Press),
p. 42, ‘Europe’, including the whole of the Soviet Union, and North America, excluding
Mexico, together contained 33-2 per cent, of the total population of the World in A.D.
1938. To arrive at an approximate estimate of the respective percentages of non-peasants
and peasants in the total population of the World at that date, we have to allow on the
one side of the account for a small non-peasant minority in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and
South and Central America, 8nd on the other side for a large peasant majority in the
Soviet Union and in the adjacent countries of Eastern Europe. On this basis the ratio
of the peasant element in the population of the World in a.d. 1938 would work out at
something like 75 per cent.; and it would be still higher if calculated on the population
estimates for mid-year a.d. 1950, given in the United Nations Demographic Year Book, 19 5 *
(New York 1931, Statistical Office of the United Nations). The estimate, as at this
date, for the aggregate population of the predominantly non-peasant parts of the World
(the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Western Europe) amount to
about 487,637,000, and those for the predominantly peasant remainder of Mankind to
about 1,910,989,000; and, on this reckoning, the peasant element will have accounted
for not much less than 80 per cent, of the World’s total population in a.d. 1950.

* Paraguay, where a native American Indian population had been initiated into the
arts of Civilization by Jesuit Roman Catholic Christian missionaries from the Old World,
should be added to this list. The Jesuits’ achievements in Paraguay have been noticed on
pp. 597-8, above.

THE OECUMENICAL PEASANTRY AND RUSSIA 6S5

every peasant household was not only to own a plot of land but to work
its own plot as a separate unit of labour and production. Yet, short of
there being any hope of raising their standard of living, there might be
no chance of saving it from being further depressed to a nadir which
would be disastrous for them and for the World as a whole, if the other
points in the peasants’ dimly conceived programme were to be treated as
sacrosanct. Could this rustic Gordian knot be untied? Or could it only
be got rid of by being cut? And, if it should prove impossible to avoid a
summary operation, what scabbard was to furnish the latter-day counter¬
part of Alexander’s sword ?

Could the problem of this vast non-Western peasantry be solved by
a culturally alien Modern Western regime such as the late British Raj in
India ? Probably not, since an alien regime can seldom venture to interfere
with the deep-seated prejudices of its subjects,' however well placed it
may be for carrying out useful reforms on the surface of life. Then could
the task be achieved under the regime of a native intelligentsia of the
kind that, in India, had become the British Raj’s heir? Such rulers
might perhaps be expected, a priori, to have better prospects of success
in commending a policy framed by their Westernized minds to a
peasantry from whom their hearts were not altogether alienated. Yet in
a . d . 1948-9 Pandit Nehru and his colleagues must have felt some mis¬
givings as they looked on from India at the death agonies in China of a
Kuomintang regime which was so similar to their own in composition,
character, and outlook, and which had come to power in China little
more than twenty years before the Congress regime’s own advent to
power in India. In those few years the Kuomintang had rapidly de¬
generated from being the generous apostles of the Ideas of the French
Revolution into becoming the corrupt conservators of traditional
Chinese vested interests; retribution for this breach of trust had been no
less quick to overtake them; and this nemesis had taken the form of a
mass-secession of the Chinese peasantry from the Kuomintang to the
Communist camp. Was Communism now to take its turn in trying to
solve in China a problem with which an abortive Chinese experiment in
Modern Western Democracy had failed to come to grips? And, if this
was to be the next chapter of Chinese history, was that a portent of what
was likely to happen next in other non-Western societies in which an
antique peasantry was likewise being shaken out of a long-established
psychological and economic inertia by the impact of Modern Western
Democracy and Technology?

In bidding for a mandate to take the world-wide problem of the
peasantry in hand, Communism had at any rate one strong card to play
mid-way through the twentieth century. At this date its advocates could
argue that, of all the societies that were saddled with the problem,
Russia was the only one so far in which an effort to grapple with it had
been made on a scale and with a vigour that were worthy of the greatness
and the gravity of the challenge; and they could go on to point out that

1 The British Raj in India had nevertheless ventured to use its power to put down
infanticide, sati, and the self-immolation of the devotees who had formerly offered
themselves year by year to be crushed to death by Juggernaut’s car.

686 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
this notable effort in Russia had not been made until after the establish¬
ment there of the existing Communist regime.

This was, indeed, one of the points in which Lenin and his com¬
panions could justly claim to have done in Russia a deed of pressing
urgency and momentous importance that had been perpetually left un¬
done by their Western-minded predecessors; for neither Tsar Peter
the Great nor Tsar Alexander II had attempted to solve the problem
of the peasantry in the terms in which their Communist successors
envisaged it.

Peter, indeed, had not tried to solve it at all, but had actually aggravated
it by piling a top-heavy superstructure of Modern Western military
organization and civil administration upon the frail foundation of a
traditional rural economy which he had neglected to reinforce without
calculating whether it would be capable of bearing the additional load
that he was remorselessly laying upon it. Peter made no serious attempt
to increase the agricultural production which was virtually the sole
economic resource of the Russia of his day, and, so far from relaxing the
legal obligations of the serfs to their owners, he tightened them up in
pursuance of a short-sighted policy of using the institution of serfdom
as an agency for the indirect collection of public revenue from the
peasant producers of Russia’s national income through the direct taxa¬
tion of the personal incomes of the serf-owners. 1

1 Peter had little cognizance of the sufferings inflicted on the population of his empire
by the social heritage of Russian Orthodox Christendom and by his own innovations
(BrQckner, A.: Peter drr Grout (Berlin 1S79. Grote), p. 513); he was concerned to place
taxation on a statistical basis (ibid., p. 513), and he looked at the peasantry primarily

from a fiscal. ' ..

the peasants ■_
with a view to increasing

laws were made more stringent < . _

to which they were attached, which had occurred for the first time in a.d. 1675, became
frequent in reter’s reign (p. 523); industrialists were permitted to buy peasants as a
means of providing themselves with man-power (p. 523); freeholders disappeared (p.

3 . The truth was that Peter did not care for agriculture, and the result was that he
e the condition of the Russian peasantry still worse than it had been before his time
(p. 5 «).

This deterioration in the peasantry’s condition went on in Russia under the Petrine
regime until A.D. 1861 (Mettig, C.: Die Europdisierung Russlands im iS. Jahrhunderte
(Gotha 1913. Perthes), p. 439), on the principle, established by Peter himself, that the
state should lend its power to force the serf to work for his master in consideration of the
work performed by the serf-owner for the state (ibid., p. 441). In a.d. 1747 the nobility
were given the right to sell their serfs, and in a.d. 1760 the right to send them to penal
servitude in European Russia or to exile in Siberia (p. 418). Passages recommending the
emancipation of the serfs, which had been included in the first draft of the Empress
Catherine II’s celebrated instructions for the abortive legislative commission that met in
Moscow in a.d. 1767-8, were omitted from the final draft at the instance of the Empress's
advisers (p. 246). In a.d. 17S0-3 the Great Russian institution of serfdom was introduced
into the Ukraine (pp. 255 and 443).

In Northern Russia, which had been opened up in relatively recent times and where
the individual initiative of the pioneer settlers was still reflected in the frequency of
peasant proprietorship, the Imperial Government was forcing communal ownership of
the land upon the local peasantry in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century (Mettig,
op. cit., p. 447). The village communities {min) were apt to treat rich peasants as the
municipal euriales had been treated in the western provinces of the Roman Empire in
the fourth and fifth centuries (ibid., p. 448), and the Imperial Government, for its part,
was hostile (p. 448) to the growth of a class of well-to-do peasants (the class pilloried
as kulaks by the subsequent Communist regime). Even under the emancipation scheme
of a.d. i86r, the ownership of the land, in so far as it passed out of the hands of the
former serf-owners, was acquired communally by the mir and not individually by
the peasants composing the village community, and the Imperial Government forced

a fiscal standpoint (p. 524). Hence he not only rejected the idea of emancipating
icasants (p. 524), but actually increased the powers of the landlords over their serfs
the landlords' tax-paying capacity (p. 523). The fugitive serf
ngent (p. 296); the practice of selling serfs apart from the land

THE OECUMENICAL PEASANTRY AND RUSSIA 687

As for Tsar Alexander II, his success in securing the abolition of
serfdom with the former serf-owners’ acquiescence was, from a Modern
Western standpoint, certainly the greatest achievement of Russian
statesmanship under the Petrine regime, and perhaps the greatest under
any regime that had ever ruled in Russia down to the time of writing. In
this act an autocratic empire which was a recent convert to the Modern
Western way of life showed itself a more sincere and more effective
devotee of Modern Western liberal ideals than the ostensibly demo¬
cratic Southern States of a republican American Union whose slave¬
owning citizens were children of the Western Civilization by birth and
not by adoption. The same decade of the nineteenth century which saw
a voluntary emancipation of the serfs in Russia saw these American
slave-owners bring disaster and disgrace upon themselves by driving
their Northern fellow countrymen to abolish slavery in the South by
force majeure, at the cost of a civil war, as a penalty for the Southerners’
own persistent failure to rid themselves of their ‘peculiar institution’ on
their own initiative. Yet, in relieving Russia, by bloodless revolution, 1 of
her institutional agrarian malady, Tsar Alexander II did nothing to cure
her technological agrarian malady; for the legal change in the peasants’
personal status was not accompanied by any appreciable change in
methods of cultivation. About half the total arable land of Russia con¬
tinued to be cultivated by the peasants individually for their own
benefit, 2 and about half by their former masters on a larger scale of agri-

thc nor to serve, in place of the former serf-owner, a9 its instrument for collecting
public revenue from the peasants and keeping them under governmental control.

Though in the latter days of serfdom in Russia there were enlightened serf-owners
who, in their treatment ot their serfs, distinguished themselves by their philanthropy
(Mettig, op. cit., p. 449), the landowners as a class were out of touch with the peasantry,
as Peter the Great had been, and this was true of the circles from which the 'Decem¬
brists’ of a.d. 182s were drawn (Le Monde Slave, Nouvelle S6ric, a”* Annie, No. ta,
December 1925 (Paris 192s, Alcan): ‘Ccntenaire des Dicabristes’, p. 366). The 'Decem¬
brists’ were military officers recruited from the landowning nobility. The private
soldiers, who were recruited from the nobility’s peasant serfs, were apt, for their part,
before they had worked out their sentence of twenty-five years' military service, to lose
a contact with the peasantry that their officers had never possessed (ibid., pp. 366-7).

1 Though, unlike the abolition of slavery in the Southern States of the American
Union, the abolition of serfdom in Russia was achieved without the owners having to
be coerced by defeat in a civil war, the Russian reforms in the eighteen-sixties were
undoubtedly accelerated and facilitated bv the antecedent defeat of Russia in a war
against foreign adversaries. The Crimean war (gerebatur a.d. 1853—56) was a military
reverse abroad which opened the way for a triumph of Liberalism at home by bringing
to a discreditable end the oppressive reign of Tsar Nicholas I ( imperabat a.d. 1825-
55). Such harvesting of liberal reforms at home from military reverses abroad was,
indeed, characteristic of Russian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The
abortive liberal revolution of A.D. 1905 was the fruit of defeat in the Russo-Japanese War
of a.d. 1002-4, and the abortive liberal revolution of a.d. 1917 the fruit of defeat in the
General War of a.d. 1914-18. Conversely, military successes abroad were apt. in this
chapter of Russian history, to play into the hands of political reactionaries on the home
front. The tyrant Nicholas I was the principal beneficiary from the Russian people’s
victory over a French invader of Russia in A.D. 1812, and this tyrant’s hold on Russia
was confirmed by the victories of his armies over the Turks in a.d. 1829 and over the
Poles in a.d. 1831. The working of the same ironical law of Russian history revealed
itself again when the Russian people’s victory over a German invader of Russia in a.d.
1940-5 served to chimp upon their shoulders, more tightly than ever, the yoke of a
Soviet Communist regime.

1 The peasants were still more eager to preserve and enlarge the allotments of land
which they cultivated individually for their own benefit than they were to obtain their
personal freedom from the bondage of serfdom. Their attitude was indicated in a reply
which an inquiring nineteenth-century serf-owner, I. Zakushkin, drew from his own

688 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
cultural operations; and the fact that the peasants now cultivated their
land as free men, and the larger landowners theirs with hired instead of
servile labour, did not have any magic effect upon a stagnant agricultural
technique. 1

No doubt, in contemporary France and Belgium and Denmark,
peasant proprietorship might be wedded with specialization in agri¬
cultural production and technique to yield increased economic returns
thanks to the auspiciously combined effects of the richness of the soil,
the proximity of favourable markets, and the peasant’s personal industry,
intelligence, and zeal in working as his own master; but these achieve¬
ments of peasant proprietorship here and there in Modern Western
Europe were irrelevant to the situation in contemporary Russia. In the
vast inefficiently cultivated expanses of Russia, agricultural productivity
could be increased only by mechanical cultivation on the grand scale,
and this was the radical reform which the Soviet Communist regime had
dared to impose by force on a Russian peasantry which would never
have adopted it of its own volition.

After the Bolsheviks had incited the peasantry to bring them into
power on a mandate to distribute the lands that Alexander II had left in
the possession of the ci-devant serf-owning landlords, a duly established
Communist regime used the power which they owed to the peasants’
support in order to reverse the policy by which this support had been
purchased. They took out of the peasants’ hands by force not only the
lands which Lenin had distributed among them individually but also
those which had been left in their hands by Alexander, and they rode
rough-shod over the peasants’ habits, prejudices, and aspirations by
compelling them to cultivate virtually all the land thenceforward in
large-scale mechanized collective farms. It could hardly be denied that
the Russian peasantry had been first deceived and then coerced by their
demonic latter-day rulers, but it would have been more difficult to refute
the Soviet Government’s contention that the Russian peasantry and,
with them, Russia herself had been dragooned into economic salvation by
this high-handed and unscrupulous act of state. If it is possible for
human beings to be saved in spite of themselves, and, if physical survival
is not too dearly bought at the price of forfeiting both liberty and happi¬
ness, the Soviet Government might claim to have been the Russian
peasantry’s saviour from economic disaster; and, since the establishment
of their ascendancy over the peasant countries of Eastern Europe after
the general war of a.d. 1939-45, they had seen to it that the same
medicine should be administered to the agrarian economy of these
satellite states by the puppet governments that had been hoisted into
office there on the points of Russian bayonets. 2

serf*: *W« belong to you, but the land belongs to us’ (Lt Monde Slave, Nouvelle Siric,
2“ Annie, No. 12, December 1925 (Paris 1925, Alcan): ‘Centenaire dcs Dicabristes’,
p. 368).

1 There had been little change in agricultural technique in Russia since the intro¬
duction of a money economy in the sixteenth century (Mettig, C.: Die Europdiriaung
Ruutondi im 18 Jahrhundertc (Gotha 1913. Perthes), p. 390). The raikolniki (i.e. the
archaizing dissidents from a Romaicizing Russian Orthodox Church) had refused to
cultivate potatoes from a feeling that any new food-plant must be Satanic (ibid., p. 396).

2 The agrarian social policy of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and its

THE OECUMENICAL PEASANTRY AND RUSSIA 689
In a.d. 1952 it was impossible to foretell whether the same destiny
was in store for the Chinese and Indian peasantries in their turn. At this
stage all that could be seen was that the problem of the starveling
peasantry had now been placed on the agenda for the governments of all
countries where such a peasantry was still to be found, and that in the
handling of this problem the Communists now held the initiative. This
was as much as to say that this problem had now become crucial for the
Modern Western World. At the time, no doubt, the Western Society’s
first concern was to put its own house in order; but a successful achieve¬
ment of this urgent and difficult task at home would not suffice to
ensure the West’s salvation; for even an internally united Western
World would find itself in a precarious position in the World as a whole
if the great peasant majority of Mankind were to be gathered into the
Communist fold; and this might be the peasantry’s cultural destiny if
the Modern Western way of life failed to offer any practical prescription
for the peasantry’s economic malady; for in that event the Communists’
prescription, however unpalatable in itself, would hold the field faute de
mieux.

satellites was all of a piece with their social policy for the urban industrial workers.
In town and country-side alike, they were deliberately creating a proletariat of the kind
which, in ninctccnth-century England, had been heedlessly brought into existence as a
social by-product of the private economic enterprise of farmers and industrialists. The
children of these English employers of rural and urban labour had taken stock of the
social result of their fathers’ economic handiwork, and had seen that it was very bad, long:
before the Communist critics of Western Capitalism had come into power in Russia and
had used this power to create the very social conditions which were being denounced
by them elsewhere. If a proletariat may be defined as a class whose members have no
personal stake in the society in which they find themselves, and no say in the ordering
of their own lives, the twentieth-century workers in the factories and collective farms of
the Soviet Union would pass this test as well as. the factory workers and agricultural
labourers of a ninctecnth-ccntury Great Britain. No doubt a spokesman of Communism
would lose no time in reminding a bourgeois observer of one obvious difference in the
situation of the proletariat in a communist and in a capitalist country. Whereas in a
capitalist country the proletariat’s masters were private employers, in n communist
country the proletariat’s sole master was the state. The difference was certainly an im¬
portant one; but, if the proletariats of the Soviet Union and the Western World could
have compared notes in A.D. 1952 on the relative rigours of their respective lots, the
proletarian employees of an omnipotent totalitarian state would probably have been
judged to be more helplessly at the mercy of their masters than those of even the most
powerful and oppressive private employers under a regime of free individual economic
enterprise.

IX. B (ii) (a) 3, ANNEX II

SOME HISTORICAL CLUES TO THE RIDDLE
OF PAKISTAN’S FUTURE

During the century and three-quarters that had elapsed between
Russia’s acquisition of a sea-board on the Black Sea in A.n. 1774 and the
transfer of the responsibility for India’s security against foreign aggres¬
sion from British to Indian hands in a . d . 1947, the imaginations of
British strategists and statesmen had been haunted by the bogey of a
Russian descent upon India from the Central Asian side of the Hindu
Kush. Was this British anxiety to be inherited by the Indian heirs of a
British Raj ? In Indian minds in a.d. 1948-49 that question could
hardly fail to be raised by the spectacle of a sweeping triumph of Com¬
munism in China. Perhaps an Indian student of history might seek com¬
fort in recalling that, when, in the thirteenth century of the Christian
Era, all the rest of Asia, up to the Euphrates and the Halys and the Car¬
pathians, had been overrun by the Mongols, the Indian sub-continent
alone had remained unmolested by world-conquerors who were lower¬
ing upon India simultaneously from a subjugated Burma and from a
subjugated Afghanistan. Yet, if our Indian knew his history well and
could bring himself to read its lessons without flinching, he might be
driven to conclude that India’s escape from the Mongols, like her en¬
counter with the English, was an exception to an historical rule that
India’s foreign conquerors were usually to be looked for across the
Hindu Kush; and, if he was also a student of political geography, the
new political map that had emerged from the partition of an oecumenical
British Indian Empire into three successor-states would call up in his
visual memory some disquieting reminiscences.

The main body of Pakistan—extending, as it did, from the south¬
eastern foothills of the Hindu Kush to the coast of the Indian Ocean at
the delta of the Indus—would remind him of the Transparopanisian
limb of the mountain-bestriding empire of the Bactrian Greeks and
their Kushan, Ghaznawl, Ghuri, and Durrani' successors; and, if he
went on to search the contemporary map for counterparts of the other
members of this geographically paradoxical yet historically familiar
composite body politic, 1 2 these would leap to his eye in the contemporary
shapes of Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics of the Soviet
Union. In the second century B.c. and in the first, the eleventh, the
twelfth, and the eighteenth century of the Christian Era, Central Asian
empire-builders with a land-locked base of operations within the borders
of the territories latterly known as Afghan and Soviet Uzbekistan had
forced the passage of the Hindu Kush and cleft their way through
Indian territory down the valley of the Indus till they had carried their

1 Previously known as Abdflli.

2 This remarkable recurrent political phenomenon of an empire bestriding the Hindu
Kush has been investigated by Sir W. Kerr Frascr-Tytler in Afghanistan (Oxford 1950,
University Press), passim, but especially Part III, chap. :.

CLUES TO PAKISTAN’S FUTURE 691
advancing south-eastern frontier to the shores of an open sea; and in the
twentieth century it required no great stretch of the political imagina¬
tion to envisage a fresh repetition of this recurrent episode of history.
Had not the creation of Pakistan prefabricated for a future empire-
builder from Central Asia the complementary Indian dominion which a
Demetrius and a Kadphiscs 1 and a Mahmud Ghaznawl and a Muham¬
mad Ghuri and an Ahmad Durrani had been required to carve out for
themselves? And, if land-locked Central Asian Powers whose metro¬
politan territories were confined within the modest limits of the Oxus-
Jaxartes Basin had been impelled by claustrophobia to make a strenuous
march to the sea across the breadth of a sub-continent, might not the
same stimulus be expected to launch on the same course an empire em¬
bracing not merely a land-locked Central Asia 2 but the entire land¬
locked ‘heartland’ of the Old World?

Since the days of Tsar Ivan the Terrible (imperabat a.d. 1533-84),
Russia had been seeking an outlet to an ice-free open sea. She had
battered her way to the east coast of the Baltic, only to find this outlet
masked by Denmark’s command of the Sound; she had battered her
way to the north coast of the Black Sea, only to find this outlet likewise
masked by Turkey’s command of the Bosphorus. The exit from Russia’s
remote north-western ice-free port of Murmansk was commanded by
the adjoining coast of Norway; Archangel was ice-bound for half the
year; Vladivostok could barely be kept open in the winter by the con¬
stant labour of icc-brcakers whose crew's saw the water freeze again be¬
hind them in their wake. 1 These results were little to show for nearly
four hundred years of Russian endeavours to reach the open sea in all
directions but one. For Russia in the twentieth century, an outlet on the
Indian Ocean was the sole still untried possibility. Was not Karachi a
tempting bait to dangle before eager Russian eyes? And could the
transfer of Karachi from British to Pakistani hands have failed to
suggest ‘dangerous thoughts’ to calculating Russian minds? 4

1 Kadphiscs II Kushan regnabat circa A.D. 50-68 (see V. v. 275, n. 3.).

1 The Central Asian Republics of the Soviet Union were represented at the Asian
Congress, convened on Pandit Nehru’s initiative, which met at Delhi on the 23rd
M»rch-2nd April, 1947.

1 The writer saw this happen with his own eyes from on board a Japanese packet-
boat which made its way into the harbour of Vladivostok, piloted by an ice-breaker, on
the 13th January, 1930.

* A corridor to Karachi was not the only attractive possibility that the creation of
Pakistan had opened up for expansive-minded Russian ^eopoliticians; for the shape
of this Muslim successor-state of the British Indian Empire was one of the curiosities
of political geography. While its main body in the Indus Valley offered an open road
to Karachi from the North-West Frontier of India, its enclave in Eastern Bengal, which
was separated from the main body of Pakistan by the whole breadth of the Indian Union,
offered an equally inviting ingress into India across a North-East Frontier which had
been opened up, in the course of the general war of a.d. 1939-45, by the building of the
Burma Road. At the moment when, in China, Communism seemed to be carrying all
before it, a Russian historian would have the pleasure of recollecting that in the thir¬
teenth century of the Christian Era the Mongol cavalry had succeeded in making their
way from Transbaikalia to Burma, across the whole breadth of China, without any
Burma Road to speed them on their path.

IX. B (ii) (a) 4, ANNEX I

THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF PANISLAMISM

The remarkable success of the core of the Islamic World in preserving
or regaining its freedom from alien political control during the 270
years that had elapsed between a.d. 1683 and a.d. 1952 1 was, no doubt,
one explanation of the equally remarkable miss-fire of a nineteenth-'
century Panislamic Movement that was the response which the Muslims
might have been expected to make to the challenge of an increasing
Western and Russian pressure upon them. The nineteenth-century
Muslims to whom the Panislamic programme of strength through soli¬
darity made an appeal were those outlying Muslim communities that
did lose their independence in this age.

Both the local Ottoman dominant minority and the Arab and Berber
subject majority of the population in Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripolitania,
for example, reversed their attitude towards the Ottoman Empire after
the initiation in a.d. 1830 of the French conquest of the Maghrib. .
During the preceding two centuries or so, the ruling element in the
Ottoman Barbary States had been bent on asserting its de facto inde¬
pendence of the Porte; from a.d. 1830 onwards both the anti-French
resistance movement in Algeria and the local Ottoman regime in the now
likewise threatened adjoining Ottoman principality of Tunisia began to
look to the Porte for support against French aggression. In a.d. 1864
the reigning Bey of Tunis sought to strengthen his tics with the Porte by
sending on a mission to Constantinople the Circassian slave-statesman
Khayr-ad-Din, who published in a.d. 1867 a book advocating the adop¬
tion of Westernizing reforms by Muslim countries as a means towards
their becoming more competent to hold their own against Western im¬
perialism. 1 A further move in the same direction was made by the
Tunisian Government in a.d. 1871. 3

From the opposite extremity of the Islamic World, similar embassies
from Central Asian Turkish Muslim rulers, soliciting the help of the
Porte against Russian imperialism, began to arrive at Constantinople in
the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, after the Russians had
begun to direct their military energies from the by then all but com¬
pleted conquest of the Caucasus to the conquest of Central Asia. 4 In
a.d. 1863 a Western traveller in Central Asia found that Central Asian
khans were taking pride and comfort in being invested with honorary

* Sec pp. 210-32, above.

1 Khayr-ad-Din Paths: Muqaddamdt Kitdb Aqraam al-MaiSlik fi Ma'rifat Ahudl al-
Mamdtik, first published in Arabic in a.d. 1867 and in a French translation, under the
title Rifoimet Neeeuairet aux Etats Mutubiums, in a.d. 1868. The writer of this Study
possesses a copy of the second French edition (Paris 1875, Dcntu) and of an Arabic
edition published at Constantinople in a.h. 1293 (a.d. 1876) at the Jevfi’ib (’News’)
Press.

1 See Davison, Roderic H.: Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876 (thesis sub¬
mitted to Harvard University for the Degree of Ph.D., 1st April, 1942), pp. 263-5 *nd
349. (The author had kindly permitted the writer of this Study to read and cite a type¬
script copy of this still unpublished work which was deposited in the Library of Harvard
University.] ‘ Sec Davison, op. cit., pp. 343-7.

THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF PANISLAMISM 693
offices in the Ottoman Padishah’s household; 1 and from a.d. 1869 on¬
wards there were contacts between the Porte and Ya'qub Beg, the
Turk! Muslim rebel against Manchu rule in the Tarim Basin. From
a.d. 1873 onwards Ya'qub caused the Padishah’s name to be inscribed
on his coinage and invoked in the Khutbah within his dominions, and an
Ottoman mission made its way from Constantinople to his headquarters.
Envoys from Afghanistan and from the Panthai Muslim rebels against
Manchu rule in Yunnan also presented themselves, on similar errands,
at the court of Sultan 'Abd-al-'Aziz (imperabat a.d. 1861-76), and in
a.d. 1873 he received an appeal from the Achincse Muslims in Sumatra
for help against the aggression of the Dutch.

A sentimental attachment to an idealised conception of the Ottoman
Empire began to appear about the same time among the Muslim diasporh
—Shi'I as well as Sunni—in India, as a psychological compensation for
the loss of their own former imperial dominion over a Hindu majority
of the population of the sub-continent and for the painfully overwhelm¬
ing service which the subsequent British conquerors of India had done
for these local Muslim predecessors of theirs in saving them from the
vengeance of the resurgent Hindus by imposing an impartial British Raj
on both these Indian communities.

The Ottoman Empire was, indeed, the only political rallying point on
which the Muslim victims of Western and Russian imperialism could
fall back—not so much in virtue of her dubious and long-neglected title
to the inheritance of the Caliphate as because, even in her nineteenth-
century infirmity, she was by far and away the most powerful, efficient,
and enlightened Muslim state in existence. At the same time, her patent
weakness in this age by comparison with the encircling non-Muslim
Powers made it an embarrassment rather than an opportunity for her to
find herself the cynosure of nineteenth-century Muslim eyes. Out of
fear of France, she forbore from making any serious response to Tuni¬
sian overtures to her between the date of the French descent on Algeria
in a.d. 1830 and the date of the long-dreaded establishment of a French
protectorate over Tunisia in a.d. 1881, and she was quite impotent to
help the Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims in their desperate
struggle to resist the imposition on them of a Russian yoke. All that the
Porte could do was to take a modest advantage of the revulsion of
Maghrib! feeling in her favour by establishing her direct rule over
Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in a.d. 1835 anc * t0 sa * ve ^ er conscience for
her inability to assist the Maghrib! and Caucasian resistance movements
in the field by giving new homes in still intact Ottoman territory to
Algerian and Circassian ‘displaced persons’ after their struggles to main¬
tain their independence had ended in an inevitable ultimate defeat.

Thus Panislamism fell between two stools. On the one hand neither
the Ottoman Empire nor, a fortiori, any other still independent Muslim
state was capable in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era of con¬
stituting itself into an effective agency for vindicating the integrity and
independence of the Islamic World as a whole, while on the other hand

* Sec Vamb&y, A.: Travels in Central Aria, 1S63 (London 1864, Murray), pp.
434 - 5 -

694 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the fact that all but a few fragments of the core of the Islamic World had
succeeded in remaining independent on a low level of vitality took the
edge off the appeal of the Panislamic gospel of self-preservation through
an increase of inter-Islamic solidarity. If, in the course of the nineteenth
century, the whole of the Islamic World, instead of a few fragments and
fringes, had been engulfed in the British, French, and Russian empires,
the nineteenth-century apostle of Panislamism, the Sayyid Jamal-ad-
Din 1 al-Afghani (vitebat circa a.d. 1S38-A.D. 1897), 2 might have found
a more favourable mission-field for his propaganda.

Jamal-ad-Din’s message to his fellow Muslims was twofold. They
were to defend themselves against the West in the first place by trans¬
cending their own traditional sectarian and political divisions and rally¬
ing round the Ottoman Padishah as Caliph, and in the second place by
adopting Western ideas, institutions, and techniques that were the secret
of the Modem’s West’s strength; 3 and it is significant that the Sayyid
was far more successful in his advocacy of the second of these two pre¬
scriptions. In his preaching of Islamic solidarity he was, it is true, un¬
precedentedly successful in gaining a following among Sunnis and Shi'is
alike. In a Sunni Egypt he was the inspiration of Shaykh Muhammad
'Abduh, and in a Shi'I Persia he moved the mujtahids in a.d. 1891-2 to
crush Nasir-ad-Din Shah’s attempt to grant a tobacco monopoly to a
group of British entrepreneurs. Yet the chief practical effect of his
missionary work was to promote the birth of a parochial nationalist
movement in Egypt and a parochial nationalist movement in Persia, and
thereby to create new, and perhaps insurmountable, obstacles to the
political unification of the Islamic World under the aegis of a universal
state crystallizing round the nineteenth-century torso of the Ottoman
Empire. In so far as Jamal-ad-Din’s Ottoman admirer and patron Sultan
‘Abd-al-Hamid II {imperabat a.d. 1876-1909) tried to translate the
Sayyid’s ideas into practice, he largely stultified the Sayyid’s intentions
by seeking in Panislamism a political prop for the declining strength of
Turkey rather than attempting to use Turkey’s residual strength as a
pillar for the support of Panislamism. 4

The inference from this aftermath of Jamal-ad-Din’s career seems to

* Accounts of the Sayyid Jamil-ad-DIn’s career and ideas will be found in Browne,
E. G.: The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909 (Cambridge 1910, University Press), pp.
1-30, and in an article by Goldziher, I.: s.v. 'Djamil al-Din al-Afghani’, in the En¬
cyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1 (Leyden 1913, Brill), ftp. 1008-11.

* According to Browne, op. cit.,p. 4, the As'adfibSd which was Jamal-ad-Din’s birth-

C lace was probably not the place of that name near Kabul, which was claimed as his
irthplace by the Sayyid himself, but the As'adabSd near Hamadan, as asserted by
Nizim-al-lslam of KIrman in his Ta'rihh-i-BidJri-i-Irdnfyan. If so, the Sayyid was bom
a Shi'i and n subject of the Shah of Persia.

> The Panislamic strategy of resistance to Western aggression against the Islamic
World could, of course, be combined equally well with either Herodian or Zealot tactics.
As an example of a Zealot-minded exponent of Panislamism we may cite the North
Caucasian Panislamic leader the Amir Shaykh Uzun Hajji Khayr Khan, who was active
in A.D. 1919. 'Uzun Hajji was distinguished by simplicity and directness, as much as
by his fanaticism. “I am twisting a rope in order to hang all engineers, students and, in
general, people who write from left to right." These words of Uzun Hajii’s...’ (Arshu-
rani, A., and Habidullin (IHabibullin], Kh: Ocherki Panislamizma i Panlyurkizma v
Rossii (Studies in Panislamism and Panturkism in Russia] (Moscow 1931, Bczbozhnik
(Ami-religiousl Press), p. 67, communicated to the writer by B. H. Sumner).

* 'Abd-al-Hamid’s exploitation of the Ottoman Caliphate has been touched upon in
VI. vii. 22-24.

THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF PANISLAMISM 695
be that the nineteenth-century Western and Russian pressure on the
heart of the Islamic World was not sufficiently severe to make the still
unsubjugated Muslim peoples feel that Western nationalism was a
luxury in which they could not afford to indulge. In any case it is an
historical fact that the still independent Islamic peoples Westernized
piecemeal, like the Ottoman Orthodox Christian peoples, instead of
Westernizing eti bloc, like Russian Orthodox Christendom, within the
political framework of a universal state.

IX. B (ii) (a) 4 , ANNEX II

THE EXPLOITATION OF EGYPT BY
MEHMED ‘ALl

Egypt was not just a passive piece of Mankind’s physical environment;
it was a creation of human audacity, industry, and genius out of the
unpromising raw material of a forbidding jungle-swamp; 1 and, unlike
its sister creature the Land of Shinar, the system of embanked and
irrigated fields in the Lower Nile Valley had never ceased, even in the
periods of its worst neglect, to be the going concern that had been made
of it in the fourth millennium b.c. by the founders of the nomes, who had
tamed the valley piecemeal, and by the subsequent founders of the
United Kingdom, who had co-ordinated these works of local reclama¬
tion into a single technologically and administratively centralized
concern. Through these abiding results of their handiwork, the genius
of the fourth-millennium makers of Egypt set its stamp more than once
in the course of subsequent history on the policy of later masters of
Egypt who had sufficient genius of their own to enter into the founding
fathers’ labours.

The founders' original lay-out of their Nilotic estate imposed on their
successors the necessity of subjecting the population to a centralized
autocratic regime in order to harvest the potential productivity of a
regimented soil and water—-whatever the proportions in which the joint
product of management and labour might afterwards be distributed
between the human parties to this vast economic enterprise 1 . This
permanent idiosyncracy of Egypt herself must be the explanation of the
astonishing similarity between the regimes respectively inaugurated by
Mehmcd 'All in the first half of the nineteenth century of the Christian
Era and by the Ptolemies at the turn of the fourth and third centuries
B.C., since it is improbable that Mehmcd 'All was aware, even dimly, of
the methods employed by these predecessors of his who were also his
Macedonian fellow countrymen, while it is impossible that he should
have been familiar with the details of the Ptolemaic administration that
were brought to light after his death by the excavation and study of
documentary papyri. Yet so masterful was Egypt herself in dictating to
her rulers the methods by which they must exploit her that a survey of
the acts of Mehmcd 'AH and his son Ibrahim might also serve, with a
mere change of names, to describe the acts of Ptolemy Soter and
Ptolemy Philadelphus.

The Turkish Macedonian rulers of Egypt, like their Greek Macedon¬
ian forerunners, planted Egypt with fruit and forest trees; 3 extended
the area of irrigation and cultivation; 4 dictated what crops should be

* See II. i. 302-15. * On this question see III. iii. 214-15.

> See Clot-Bey, A. B.: Aperfu GMral lur I'figyptc (Pa ris 1840, Fortin ct Masson,

2 volt.), vol. i, p. 153.

* See Jabarti, Snaykh 'Abd-ar-Rabmin a!-: 'Ajd’ib-al-Athur fi’t-Tarajim aa'l-
Akhbdr (French translation: Cairo 1888-1896, Imprinicric Nationalc; Paris 1888-1896,
Leroux), vol. ix, p. 194; Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 242 and 247; vol. ii, pp. 436-7;

EXPLOITATION OF EGYPT BY MEHMED 'ALl 697
sown in what quantities; 1 laid out model farms and botanical gardens; 2
introduced new crops, of which cotton was the chief, 3 but which also
included silk, indigo, sugar, hemp, and opium; 4 imported agricultural
experts from abroad and sent Egyptian students of agriculture to Europe
and the West Indies ; 5 and monopolized for the Government the purchase
of the cotton, rice, gum, indigo, sugar, opium, and other crops. 6

Under Mehmed 'All’s rdgime in Egypt the peasants had become the
Government’s tenants—holding the arable land in usufruct only, and
paying kharSj—in the course of the years a.d. 1808-14, when Mehmed
'All had abolished tax-farming ( illisam ), eliminated the tax-farmers
( multazims ), and expropriated the waqf endowments invested in arable
land (as distinct from gardens and houses) against compensation in the
form of annuities from the public treasury. 7 The new system of direct
collection of the land-tax by the Government itself was based on a new
survey of the land. 8 By the time when the Government had also taken it
upon itself to direct the peasants’ agricultural operations, to supply
them with the means of production, and to buy their non-cereal crops at
fixed prices, the peasants had become mere hands on a state-managed
plantation coextensive with the cultivated area of the country, 6 and the

Kramers, J. H., s.v. ‘Khcdiw’, in the Encyclopaedia 0f Islam, vol. ii (Leyden 1917,
Brill), p. 947.

' See Jabarti. op. cit., vol. i*. p. 190; Bowring, Report on Egypt and Candia (London
1840, Clowes), pp. 14 and 19. ‘He not only compelled the fellih to cultivate, but in some
areas he determined what crops should be grown, and required the produce to be de¬
livered into the government warehouses at a fixed rate’ (Dodwcll, H.: The Founder of
Modem Egypt (Cambridge 1931, University Press), p. 218).

2 See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 154-60, and vol. ii, p. 394; Bowring, op. cit.,
pp. 26-27.

3 Cotton culture was started in Egypt in A.n. i82r and Sea Island cotton seed from
South Carolina was introduced in a.d. 1828 (Kramers, op. cit., pp. 947-8).

* See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 260^9; Bowring, op. cit., pp. 21—22 and 23;
Kramers, op. cit., p. 948. According to Bowring, loc. cit., Ibrahim Pasha started a sugar
plantation and sugar mills, and sent a certain Omer Efendi to the West Indies to study
rum-making. According to Kramers, op. cit., the cane-sugar culture in Upper Egypt
was started only in A.D. 1867, in the reign of the Khedive Isma'il.

» See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 257; Bowring, op. cit., pp. 23 and 26.

6 Sec Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 186; Bowring, op. cit., p. 20.

7 Sec Clot-Bcy ( op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 182-3; Kramers, op. cit., p. 946. Details are given
in Dodwcll, op. cit., p. 32. In A.D. 1808 Mehmed 'All investigated the multazims' titles
and records, and then annulled all irregular grants and expropriated (on pensions) all
multazims who were in arrears with their payments to the Treasury. The surviving nal-
tazims were expropriated in a.d. 1814 (see Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, p. 79).

8 See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, p. 90.

» Mehmed 'AH ‘succeeded in centralising the entire production in his own hands [by
his monopoly system] and of [lie] disposing of it freely; the peasants were no more than

3 -labourers who were obliged to sell their products at fixed prices to the Government
to pay likewise their taxes in kind’ (Kramers, op. cit., p. 947; cp. Clot-Bey, op. cit.,
vol. ii, pp. 182-3). The impact made by Mehmed 'Ali's monopoly system on the life
of the Egyptian people reverberates through Jnbarti’s narrative. In a.d. 1812 Mehmed
'All monopolized the marketing of the entire cereal crop of Upper Egypt and the entire
rice crop (ibid., vol. viii, pp. 344 and 348); but the practice was not confined to the
handling of agricultural p roduce.In the same year, the Pasha monopolized the marketing
of imports, at the same time raising the prices (ibid,, vol. viii, p. 345), and established
a hold over internal transport by building a river-fleet which he operated himself (ibid.,
vol. viii, p. 345). He also monopolized slaughter-houses (ibid., vol. viii, p. 351) and even
forbade artisans to work for private employers (ibid., vol. viii, p. 357). According to
Jabarti the new monopolies were devisea by Greeks and Armenians and were farmed
out by the Pasha to them (ibid., vol. viii, p. 355). In a.d. 1814 Mehmed 'All monopolized
the transport of Ottoman pilgrims to the Islamic Holy Places in the Hijaz, and exacted
his price from them (ibid., vof. ix, p. 100).In A.D. 1816 he established a virtual monopoly
over all shipping (ibid., vol. ix, p. 197). The objective of these monopolies was, of course,

698 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
servile status to which they had been reduced was brought home to
them by the conscription of their labour for public works. 1

It will be seen that, unlike Peter the Great, Mehmed 'All did not
neglect the agricultural basis of his Western superstructure; but the
measures which he took in his fundamental economic policy have to be
credited—or debited—to the dictates of Egypt as well as to the prompt¬
ings of Mehmed 'All’s own genius. Peter's economic insight was
certainly not inferior to his; and we may indeed surmise that Mehmed
‘All, had he been Tsar of Muscovy, would have neglected agriculture
as Peter did, and that Peter, had he been Viceroy of Egypt, would have
fostered agriculture by the drastic but dubious methods of Mehmed 'All.

price-control with a view to price-raising. The state slaughter-houses sold their product
to the butcher* at fixed wholesale prices, and the butchers' retail prices were likewise
fixed by the state (op. cit., vol. ix, p. 226). According to Jabarti (vol. ix, pp. 224 et se^q.)
the imposition by the state of maximum retail prices without regard to seasonal variations
in the relation between supply and demand, and even without regard to the levels of
the state-imposed wholesale prices, proved paralysing for trade. In a.d. 1817 Mehmed
'AH established a monopoly of hides at fixed prices (ibid., vol. ix, p. 252) and a monopoly
of the operation of all looms. The raw material* of the textile industry were bought up
by the Government and were distributed by it to the weavers, and the product was then
sold by the Government at about three times the previous price (pp. 252-3). In a.d.
1820 Mehmed ‘All monopolized soap (ibid., vol. ix, p. 317).

One of the objects of British polity in the negotiation of the Anglo-Ottoman commer¬
cial treaty of the 16th August, 1838, was to secure the abolition of monopolies in the
Ottoman Empire with an eye to insisting on the application of this treaty provision to
Ottoman territories under Mehmed * All's administration. An escape-clause in previous
Ottoman capitulations which had left the Ottoman Government a loophole for establish¬
ing monopolies at will was duly eliminated by the terms of the new treaty (Dodwcll,
op. cit., pp. 220-1; Bailey, P. E.: British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement,
1S26-1853 (Cambridge, Mass. 1942, Harvard University Press), p. 125); but subse¬
quent local negotiations between representatives of the British Government and
Mehmed 'Ali ended in a compromise. It was agreed that Mehmed 'Ali should maintain
his monopolies on condition of his selling the produce at public auction (Dodwcll, op.
cit., p. 222).

« Jabarti records that in A.D. 1817 peasant* were conscripted to dig a new Alexandria
canal (op. cit., vol. ix, p. 240). In a.d. 1819 they were conscripted again for canal digging,
and this just before the maize harvest, so that it was no wonder that they had to be
secured with ropes round their necks (ibid., vol. ix, p. 299)- In 1818, 4,000 young men
were conscripted to work in government factories (ibid., vol. ix, p. 274).

IX. B (ii) (a) 5, ANNEX

JEWISH HISTORY AND THE MILLET IDEA

By James Parkes

The conception of community evolved between the first and fourth
centuries of the Christian Era by a Rabbinic Judaism fitted admirably
into the millet idea; and, so long as the majority community was pre¬
pared to allow a Jewish community milletal autonomy, the essential
minimum requirements of Rabbinic Judaism could be maintained in
any country' in the World. In tolerating a variety of legal and social
systems within a larger whole, Medieval Christendom as well as Islam
made a Jewish Millet an acceptable social organisation for Judaism, and
in the Western Society the Jewish Millet outlived by centuries all its
peers, surviving until the nineteenth-century emancipation.

It seems to me, however, necessary to recognize that the millet idea
in East and West, while it made Jewish survival possible by its recogni¬
tion of communal autonomy, yet contained elements which made it
intolerable as a permanent social organization. In particular the idea of
inequality seems to me to be inherent in it. Neither Islam nor Medieval
Christendom recognized Jews as equals; and both tolerated Jewish
autonomy because both had the power to circumscribe it at will in their
own interests. In both East and West there was also the social factor, in
the sense that the inferiority of status implicit in the milletal dispensation
encouraged a contempt which was always there, even if under the surface.
A great deal of rubbish is talked about the excellent situation of Jews
under Islam before Zionism. Existence for all but a few rich merchants
was unenviable in the ghettoes and mal5s of the Islamic World for many
centuries before Zionism as a political movement was born.

Emancipation, by its emphasis on Judaism as an individual ethic, and
on Jews as citizens manifesting a^personal difference only in the religious
buildings which they attended (or did not attend) for worship one day
a week, created just the situation described by you. 1 Gentile societies
that could afford not to fear Jewish competition accepted Jews; Gentile
societies that had a still unfulfilled ambition to breed a native Gentile
‘bourgeoisie’ of their own hated the Jews and were jealous of them. But
either situation dealt only with that aspect of Jewish life which expressed
itself in economic structures and adaptabilities; and both ignored the
fact that the heart of Judaism and of Jewish communal life was left un¬
satisfied by an economic liberty' supplemented by a right to go to syna¬
gogue on Saturday instead of going to church on Sunday. The core of
Rabbinic Judaism, inherited from its interpretation of the Law and the
Prophets of the Old Testament, was a belief in a community that would
give scope for a social justice and a righteousness which were the divinely
appointed objectives of Man’s life in This World. The ideal had been
narrowed, ossified, and even perverted by the conditions of millet life:
but within the Millet it had at least a chance of survival.

* On pp. 285-8, above.—A.J.T.

700 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

After the dissolution of the Millet, Jews individually plunged, where
free, with enthusiasm into all movements for social reform and humani-
tarianism in a nineteenth-century Western World; but in Eastern
Europe, where most of the Jewish people lived, the local conditions
ruled out the possibility of any such individual Jewish participation in
a liberal Gentile life; and therefore here one of two things was bound to
happen. Some East European Jews sought an outlet for their inner
malaise in taking part in Gentile revolutionary movements, some in an
attempt to find a new communal basis for Jewish life. When a recrudes¬
cence of Antisemitism in Western Europe inhibited, or prevented,
individual Jews there from expressing themselves in Gentile national
movements aiming at the achievement of greater social righteousness,
Jews in Western Europe likewise began to be attracted to one of the
two alternatives which had grown out of the Eastern European situation.

In both East and West a return to a milletal dispensation was ruled
out. With all its merits a millet system is only possible either in a society
that is at a much more developed stage than any society had yet reached
at the time of writing, or else in a society in which there is no effective
devolution of responsibility and authority from the central government
to the local geographical administration—the city, the county, or what
not. The Islamic Society's weakness in this respect had enabled the
millet system to survive in Dar-al-Islam down to recent times, and had
allowed minorities a certain liberty and vitality, but this only at the cost
of their having to live within a general framework of stagnation. It was
inevitable that to many Jews the only alternative should seem to be
the autonomy (or independence) of the national community (it is interest¬
ing that Austrian Jewish ‘revolutionaries’ for some time sought to cope
with the nationality problem in Eastern Europe along the lines of
‘personal nationality’, which was an attempt to adapt the millet idea to
contemporary European conditions).

Jews turned to Nationalism, not only because it was the contemporary
vogue, but also because, with the failure of the idea of ‘personal national¬
ity’, it was the only framework within which the unsatisfied longing for
a medium in which to work for greater social righteousness could be
satisfied. In other words, there were deeper Jewish roots for Jewish
nationalism than you have allowed for.

It is also interesting to discover the way in which the emergence of
a Jewish nationalism—which was, as you say, fantastic in terms of the
non-existence of a territory where Jews cultivated the soil—followed
a period of intense Jewish intellectual activity which had been devoted
largely to the study of Jewish history, and not merely to the study of
a Rabbinic Judaism which a Rabbinic orthodoxy had come to regard as
the Jewish intellect’s sole legitimate field. The flowering of a Judischc
Wissenschaft is an integral part of the picture of the emergence of a
Modem Jewry; and this must also be regarded as being one of the
outstanding events in the Jews’ encounter with the Western Society,
since it was the product of Jewish access to Western academic and
intellectual life.

IX. B (ii) (a) 7, ANNEX

THE WELTANSCHAUUNG OF ALEXANDER

HERZEN

Alexander Herzen ( vivebat a.d. 1812-70) was the natural son of a
Russian nobleman by a German mother. While still a student at the
University of Moscow, he fell foul of the autocratic regime of Tsar
Nicholas I. He left Russia in a.d. 1847 and spent the rest of his life in
Western Europe in a society of Russian and Western liberal exiles. In
taking this personal course, Herzen was opting for Westernization, and
he accounted himself an opponent of his ‘Slavophil’ Russian contem¬
poraries ; yet in the same breath he proclaimed his affinity with them :

‘Yes, we were their opponents, but very strange ones. We had the same
love, but not the same way of loving, and, like Janus or the two-headed
eagle, we looked in opposite directions, though the heart that beat within
us was but one.’ 1

The love which these nineteenth-century Russian ‘Herodians’ and
Russian ‘Zealots’ shared was, of course, their love for Russia; but an even
stronger bond between them was a hatred which they likewise shared
for a middle-class outlook and way of life that had become dominant
in the contemporary Western World. Herzen revolted as violently as the
Slavophils themselves against any suggestion that Russia might renounce
her historic identity by abandoning herself to this Modern Western
middle-class culture. This idea seemed outrageous to him because he
believed no less fervently than the Slavophils in Russia’s destiny; and
this belief that Russia had a destiny incompatible with conversion to
the Modern Western middle-class way of life brought Herzen into line,
not only with his Slavophil Russian contemporaries, but also with his
Communist Russian successors. As an anti-bourgeois Russian aristocrat
he became a Russian prophet of a socialism that was to be attained in
Russia through revolution and was to lead to a sanguinary conflict be¬
tween Russia and a Western World from which Russia—Slavophil or
Socialist—was divided by a permanent and unbridgeable moral gulf.

These features in Herzen’s outlook are brought out in his memoirs
with a wealth of illustration of which only a few characteristic specimens
can be cited here.

‘The Western European is not in a normal condition; he is moulting.

. . . The historical process has left in the foreground the slimy stratum of
the petty-bourgeois, under which the fossilised aristocratic classes arc
buried and the rising masses submerged. 1 . . . The petty-bourgeois were
not produced by the Revolution. ... Set free, they passed over the dead
bodies of those who had freed them, and established their own regime. 3

1 This passage from Herzen’s periodical The Bell, p. 90, is quoted in Herzen, A.:
My Past and Thoughts, English translation by Garnett, C. (London 1924-7, Chatto and
Windus, 6 vols.), vol. ii, pp. 254 and 302. The quotations from Mrs. Garnett’s transla¬
tion have been made with the permission of the publishers.

1 HerzcD, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 22S-9. * Ibid., vol. iii, p. 134; cp. p. 147.

702 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

... Parliamentary government... is simply the wheel in a squirrel’s cage,
and the most colossal one in the World. 1 ... Under the influence of petty-
bourgeoisie, everything is changed in Europe. Chivalrous honour is re¬
placed by the honesty of the book-keeper, elegant manners by propriety,
courtesy by stiff decorum, pride by a readiness to take offence, parks by
kitchen gardens, palaces by hotels open to all (that is, all who have
money).* . . . Bourgeoisie is the final form of Western European Civilisa¬
tion, its coming of age. . . . This closes the long series of its visions. . . .
By hard work the nations of the West have won their winter quarters.
Let others show their mettle.’*

How infinitely remote from all this is the Russian spirit!

'Petty Bourgeoisdom is incompatible with the Russian character—and
thank God for it. 4 . .. There is .. . something irrational in our lives, but
there is nothing vulgar, nothing stagnant, nothing bourgeois. ... You are
restrained by scruples, you are held back by second thoughts. We have
neither second thoughts nor scruples; all we lack is strength . . . Wc
have no law but our nature, our national character.’*

Russia’s character is her destiny, and a nineteenth-century Herzen is
as sure of this destiny as a sixteenth-century Philotheus. 6

'Are we not perhaps satisfied with vestibules because our history is still
knocking at the gate? 7 ... In our attitude to the Europeans . . . there are
points of resemblance to the attitude of the Germans to the Romans. In
spite of our exterior, we are still barbarians. 8 . . . Wc have nowhere those
hard-and-fast prejudices which, like a paralysis, deprive the Western
European of the use of half his limbs. 9 . . . (The Polish « 5 migr£s] had a rich
past; we had a great hope. Their breast was covered with scars, while we
were toughening our muscles to receive them. Beside them, we were like
recruits beside veterans. The Poles are mystics; we arc realists. 10 ... Have
we not. . . the right to look upon Russia as . . . the centre towards which
the Slav World, in its striving toward unity, is gravitating?" ... Do you
not think it would be as well to become more closely acquainted with this
inconvenient neighbour who makes himself felt throughout the whole of
Europe, in one place with bayonets, in another with spies ?’ ,J

The next manifestation of Russia’s puissant non-Western destiny
will be an anti-bourgeois revolution.

'The free and rational development of Russian national existence is at
one with the ideas of Western Socialism." . . . The Russian enjoys a
terrible advantage over the European; he has no traditions, no habits,
nothing akin to him to lose. The man who has no wealth of his own or
of others goes most safely along dangerous paths." . . . The Russian
imperial autocracy ... is a military and civil dictatorship with far more
resemblance to the Cacsarism of Rome than to a feudal monarchy. A dic¬
tatorship . . . cannot be permanent.'* . . . Who will be the predestined
saviour? . . . Whoever it may be, it is our task to meet him with warm
welcome.’ 16

» Heracn. op. cit., vol. iii, p. 144* * Ibid., vol. iii, p. 142.

* Ibid., vol. vi, p. 6s. 4 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 229. i Ibid., vol. vi, p. 240.

* See VI. vii. 25-36* 7 Herien, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 114.

* Ibid., vol. vi, p. 46; cp. vol. iv p. 23. « Ibid., vol. vi, p. 92.

10 Ibid., vol. iv, p. 209. ” Ibid., vol. vi, p. 220. Ibid., vol. vi, p. 2x1.

" Ibid., vol. ii, p. 278. 14 Ibid., vol. vi, p. 106,

»* Ibid., vol. vi, p. 115. 16 Ibid., vol. v, p. 331.

WELTANSCHAUUNG OF ALEXANDER HERZEN 703

Herzen’s exultation over his vision of Russia’s revolutionary future is
seldom chilled by the cold touch of doubt.

‘Wc perhaps ask for too much and shall get nothing. That may be so,
but yet we do not despair .’ 1

He seems naively blind to the trenchancy of Western comments on the
Russian ethos, which he records en passant. ‘You Russians are either the
most absolute slaves of your Tsar or . . . anarchists, and it follows from
that that it will be a long time before you arc free’, the conservative and
monarchist-minded Due dc Noailles once remarked to Herzen. 1 ‘I tell
you what, gentlemen: Hard as it may be for us with the Russian Govern¬
ment, anyway our position under it is better than what these socialist
fanatics are preparing for us’, declared the Polish emigre Demontowicz
after prolonged arguments with the Russian Emigre Bakunin. 1

Herzen is not dismayed by the prospect, which he foresees, of a head-
on collision between a revolutionary Russia and a conservative West.

‘Our classic ignorance of the Western European will be productive of
a good deal of harm; race hatreds and bloody collisions will develop from
it later on . 4 . . . Much hatred yet will be engendered and much blood yet
will flow' through this difference in the two stages of growth and educa¬
tion 5 . . . from “the conflict of these two different forms of culture ”.’ 6

IX. B (ii) (c) 2, ANNEX

SICILIAN LIGHT ON ROMAN ORIGINS

In rejecting as a professional pedigree-maker’s fake the story, immortal¬
ized by Virgil, that the ancestors of the Romans were refugees from a
foundering Minoan World who had been cast up on the coast of Italy
by the same tornado that stranded the Philistines on the coast of Syria,
we need not rule out the possibility that the Romans may in fact have
been descended from immigrants of a later date.

This possibility is suggested by a consideration of the linguistic map
of Italy in the period between the establishment of the Greek and
Etruscan settlements on Italian ground and the subsequent Latinization
of the Peninsula as a result of a Roman conquest. In the intervening age,
* languages of the Latin type were spoken by three peoples: the Sicel
natives of Sicily, 1 the Ligurians in the North-Western Appennines and
the Maritime Alps, 1 and the Latins and Falisci in the lower basin of the
River Tiber. The rest of the Italian Peninsula, apart from the Greek and
Etruscan settlements, was occupied in that age by peoples speaking
other languages who would appear to have spilled over into Italy from
the north-east in three successive waves. A wave of Umbrian-spcakers
had reached the west coast both north and south of Latium; for Umbrian
dialects were spoken by the untamed Volscians (‘marshmen’) in the
Pomptinc swamps, as well as by the natives of an Etruria where, under
an alien ascendancy, the largest river in the land testified to the nationality
of the subject population by continuing to bear the name Umbro
(Ombrone). Behind the Umbrian-speakers stood the Oscan-speakcrs,
and behind these the Illyrian-speaking peoples of Venetia, Apulia, and
Northern Calabria.

The general configuration of this linguistic map suggests that the
speakers of languages of the Latin type in this age were survivors of an
earlier wave of immigrants into Italy who had been pushed out south-
westward into Sicily beyond the Straits of Messina and north-westward
into a Ligurian highland fastness by three waves following in their
wake; but this interpretation still leaves to be explained the presence of
a Latin-speaking population in the open country of Latium. How are
we to account for this Latin enclave in an elsewhere Umbrian and Oscan

* The fragmentary surviving relics of the Sicel language have been presented and dis¬
cussed by R. S. Conway in The Cambridge Ancient History\ vol. iv (Cambridge 1926,
University Press), pp. 436-7; by J. Whatmough in The Foundations 0] Roman Italy
(London 1937, Methuen), pp. 365-6; and by T. J. Dunbabin in The Western Greeks
(Oxford 1948, Clarendon Press), pp. 189-00. As it appears to the writer of this Study,
the evidence proves conclusively that the Sicels’ mother tongue was virtually identical
with Latin, and that it can be classed at any rate as a language belonging to the same
sub-group as Latin within an Italic family in which the other two sub-groups were the
Oscan and the Umbrian.

2 The relics of the Ligurian language have been presented and discussed by Conway
in loc. cit., pp. 433-5, a, ? < * Whatmough in op. cit., pp. 129-30. Whatmough agrees
with Conway that Ligurian is an Indo-European language of Sicel affinities, and, pace
Whatmough’s judgement that it is not a member of either the Italic or the Celtic family,
the present writer ventures the opinion that Ligurian, os well as Sicel, will turn out to
be an Italic language of the Latin sub-group.

SICILIAN LIGHT ON ROMAN ORIGINS 705
Central Italy, just beyond the south-eastern limits of the Umbrian
territory that had been occupied by the Etruscans ? We may find a clue
to the puzzle if we turn our eyes for a moment to a point just beyond the
opposite extremity of Etruria, along the coast to the north-west of the
mouth of the River Arno.

Here, at the eastern end of the Italian Riviera, we find four place-
names—not of Roman mintage, and therefore presumably ante-dating
the Roman conquest—that are identical with the principal place-names
in the Elymian country in the north-western corner of Sicily. The Gulf of
Spe2ia is flanked by a Port of Eryx (the latter-day Lerici), bearing the
name of the celebrated Sicilian mountain, and by a Portus Veneris,
dedicated to the same goddess as the celebrated temple of Aphrodite on
the Sicilian mountain’s flank. Again, about half-way between the Gulf
of Spczia and Genoa, the mouth of the River Labonia (Lavagna) is
flanked on one side by a Segesta (the latter-day Sestri Levante) and on
the other by an Entella (still commemorated in the name of a local
stream). This fourfold correspondence between place-names in Sicily
and on the Riviera can hardly be accidental; we cannot reject the in¬
ference that the places known by these four names in Liguria had been
called after the four places with identical names in Sicily, or vice versa;
and the probability that the group of names in Liguria was derived from
the group in Sicily is indicated by the fact that in Liguria, as in Sicily,
the mountain-name appears in the Graecized form ‘Eryx’ and not in a
Ligurian equivalent of the Latin form ‘verruca’ (‘peak’), which we
should expect to find surviving here if the name had originated in Liguria
and had been carried thence to Sicily.

The reappearance of these four Sicilian names on the Riviera thus
indicates that the Sicilian Elymi had planted settlements here at some
date; and this date must be earlier than the Roman Age; for the Romans
did not draw on their Graecized Sicilian subjects for the colonists whom
they planted at Luna and other points in and around Liguria in and
after the second century b.c. The hypothesis that most naturally suggests
itself is that these Elymian settlements along the Eastern Riviera were
part of the older colonizing movement that had created Magna Graccia
and Etruria. We know that the Elymi were particularly receptive to
Hellenic influences, besides being particularly hard pressed by the
encroachments of Greek intruders on their territory. It might well have
occurred to them to relieve the pressure of population in a shrunken
homeland in Sicily by resorting to the Greek expedient that had borne
so hard upon the Elymians themselves. Why should they not follow
the Greeks’ example by colonizing some stretch of West Mediterranean
coastline where the natives were sufficiently backward to be easily
subdued or expelled? If, at some stage in the colonizing movement that
was in process from the eighth to the sixth century B.C., the Elymians
did join in the game, an obvious field for them to choose would have
been the Riviera between the north-western outposts of the Etruscans
and the eastern outposts of the Massiliots. The Italian Riviera had a
promising commercial hinterland in the upper basin of the River Po,
and thus in their general location the four Elymian settlements were

B 2898 vm a a

706 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
well placed—though the Hannibalic War was eventually to demonstrate
that, in overlooking the superlative advantages of Genoa, the Elymian
prospectors had been no less blind than those Mcgarian Greek pros¬
pectors who passed by the vacant site of Byzantium in order to settle
at Calchcdon. 1

The Elymian settlers along the Eastern Riviera had, however, at any
rate chosen a location where they could count on a ‘natural frontier’ to
safeguard them against Etruscan encroachments; for, as late as the time
of the Hannibalic War, the lower valley of the Arno was a pestilential
swamp, which Hannibal’s army found it almost as difficult to traverse as
the Alps, and which cost their leader the loss of an eye. The Etruscans’
Latin neighbours at the opposite extremity of the Marcmma likewise
enjoyed the benefit of a protective river-barrier which enabled the
Romans to repulse the Etruscan war-lord Lars Porsenna’s attempt to
reconquer them after they had expelled their Etruscan tyrant Tarquin.
On the analogy of the Elymian settlements along the Riviera, is it too
rash a conjecture to guess that the cluster of Latin-speaking communi¬
ties adjoining the lower course of the Tiber, which appear on the
linguistic map of Italy in the period intervening between the coloniza¬
tion of Magna Graecia and Etruria and the Roman conquest, were not
relics of an aboriginal deposit of peoples speaking languages of the Latin
type, but were colonists from Sicily who had succeeded in thrusting
themselves into a promising site in between the farthest south-eastern
outpost of Etruria and the farthest north-western outpost of Magna
Graecia ?

A scrutiny of the map of Latium and the adjoining Faliscan country
confirms the impression that this Tiberine enclave of Latin-speaking
population was not, like the Volscians’ marshes or the Hcrnicans’
crags, a fastness in which a hard-pressed native people had managed to
hold out against aggressive assailants, but was a ‘bridgehead’ established
by invaders from overseas who had made a landing vi et armis on the
beaches just south-east of Ostia. On this reconstruction of an unrecorded
chapter of history, the Falisci would be a vanguard of the Sicel invaders
who rashly pushed up the Tiber Valley and settled on its right bank,
only to fall permanently under the domination of Etruscans on whose
preserves they were trespassing. A more cautious Latin rear-guard would
have confined its encroachments within an area covered by a number of
natural frontiers: the river-line constituted by the courses of the Lower
Tiber and its tributary the Anio, the south-western spurs of the Sabine
Mountains, and the natural system of fortifications provided by the
rampart-like slopes of the craters-within-craters known as the Alban
Hills. The fortresses built by the Latin interlopers to protect this peri¬
meter would have been Rome, Tibur, Praencstc, and Alba Longa.

On this showing, there would be a sense in which Rome had been
‘an Hellenic city’ 2 already before the first stone of her material structure
had been laid, since it would have been an Hellenic example that had
inspired her Sicel founders to join in a colonizing movement that in the
eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries B.c. was planting the west coast of
* See II. ii. 43-48. a See V. v. 212, n. 3.

SICILIAN LIGHT ON ROMAN ORIGINS 707
Italy, from a Chalcidian Rhcgium on the Straits of Messina to an
Elymian Entella on the Riviera, with sea-borne settlers of Greek,
Etruscan and Sicilian origin.

This inference from a linguistic map has some support in the Roman
literary tradition, for Siculi or Sicani are located in Latium by both
Virgil and Pliny. Siculi are named by Pliny in a list of early peoples of
Latium , 1 and Sicani in a list of ‘carnem in Monte Albano soliti accipere
populi Albcnses .’ 2 Sicani are thrice enumerated by Virgil among the
peoples already established in Latium before the advent of Aeneas . 1 In
the first and the third of these passages of the Aeneid, these Latian
Sicani are associated with the Rutuli and the Aurunci, and in the third
passage these three peoples are described as being one another's
neighbours.

This Virgilian tradition of a Sican clement in the population of
Latium is, of course, quite independent of the talc of a Trojan invasion
of Latium which is the main theme of the Aeneid. Indeed, Virgil makes
his Latian Sicans join with the other old inhabitants of Latium in
attempting to resist the Trojan intruders. While continuing to reject
the tale of a Trojan settlement in Latium as fictitious, we may perhaps
accept the tradition of a Sican settlement in Latium with the amend¬
ment that these Latian Sicans were colonists from Sicily who had not
settled in Latium before the eighth century b.c. at the earliest.

1 Plinius Secundus, C.: Hisloria Naturalis, Book III, chap, v (ix), § 56.

2 Op. cit., Book III, chap, v (ix), § 60.

J See Aeneid, Book VII, 1 . 795; Book VIII, I. 3 a8; Book XI, L 3 » 7 -

IX. C (i), ANNEX

‘ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE’: FACTS AND
FANTASIES

In the introduction to his history of a concatenation of encounters
culminating in a collision between the Achacmenian Empire and the
Hellenic World, 1 Herodotus professes to reproduce a Persian exposition
of the motive that had impelled the Achacmenidae to take the offensive
against the Hellenes, and of a theory of history which was the ground of
the Persians’ Hellenophobia according to this story. The alleged motive
is one of the characteristic points of honour in the barbarian Weltan¬
schauung of the Heroic Age. The Persians, according to Herodotus,
believed that they had inherited a blood feud in which the latest entry
in the running account" was a still unavenged injury, suffered by pre¬
decessors of theirs, which it was their moral duty to requite. The alleged
theory in virtue of which the Persians arc represented by Herodotus as
believing themselves to be saddled with this obligation is as sophisticated
as the blood-feud motif is primitive. The Persians, according to Hero¬
dotus, felt it incumbent on themselves to exact vengeance from the
Hellenes for the siege and sack of Troy because, on the Persian theory
of history, the Persians’ own encounter with the Hellenes, the Trojans’
encounter with them, and the Colchians’ and the Phoenicians’ encounters
with them before that, were so many incidents in an historic feud be¬
tween Asia and Europe. The hypothetical continuity of the feud would
make these incidents historically continuous with one another and so
create a moral solidarity between successive representatives of Asia in
this quarrel of the continents.

The wrong inflicted on Asia which the Persians arc declared by
Herodotus to have felt it to be their duty to avenge was the Hellenes’
wanton offence of retaliating for the abduction of a princess by waging
a war of annihilation and thereby opening a new and unprecedentedly
devastating chapter in the feud between Europe and Asia. 2

‘Up to this point the injuries that they had inflicted on one another had
been confined to abductions, but at this juncture the Hellenes put them¬
selves monstrously in the wrong. They committed an unprovoked act of
military aggression against Asia when the Asiatics were still innocent of
any such outrage against Europe. . . . The Persians claim that “they”
(identifying themselves with the Asiatics) had let the abductions pass
without taking any notice, whereas the Hellenes had exacted vengeance
for the abduction of a Lacedaemonian princess by collecting a great
expeditionary force and then invading Asia and destroying Priam’s
empire. From that date, the Persians say, “they” had always regarded
the Hellenic World as being in a state of war with “them”—the point
being that the Persians lay claim to Asia and to the non-Hellenic Asiatic
peoples as their own domain, while they think of Europe and the Hellenic
World as being an alter orbis. This is the Persians’ version of the course of

* This Herodotean concatenation of encounters has been discussed cn pp. 454-60,
above.

* The 'chain-reactions’ that 'in real life’ arc apt to be set in motion by such wanton
act* of hybris have been discussed on pp. 454-63, above.

•ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE’ 709

historical events: they see in the sack of Troy the origin of their own
quarrel with the Hellenes .’ 1

If any of Herodotus’s Persian contemporaries had ever taken Hellenic
life and letters seriously enough to think of reading this Asiatic Greek
historian’s introduction to his story of an oecumenical concatenation
of encounters, the Persian explorer of an alien Hellenic mental world
would assuredly have been taken aback at finding his countrymen
credited with the motive and the theory that Herodotus has here attri¬
buted to them. The authentic motive behind the Persians’ unsuccessful
attempt, between 492 and 479 b.c., to conquer the then still independent
residue of the Hellenic World was certainly not to avenge legendary
wrongs supposedly inflicted on Trojan victims by Achaean aggressors.
The number of Persians who had heard of ‘the Trojan War' cannot have
exceeded the number who were familiar with the epic poetry of their
Asiatic Greek subjects , 2 and a Persian who knew Homer must indeed have

1 Herodotus, Book I, chaps. 4-5. Caricature is perhaps the best comment on this
Herodotean reconstruction of the historical antecedents of the encounter between the
Achaemenidae and the Hellenes. Let us imagine that, at a date still in the future at the
time of writing, Continental Western Europe has been militarily overrun and politically
subjugated by the Soviet Union and that Herodotus has returned to life to write the
history of a consequent conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. We
can imagine him transposing this episode in an encounter between the Western and the
Russian civilizations into terms of a ‘war of the worlds’ in which the Old World and the
New World arc the perennial parties to an inter-mundane feud.

'The Castilians', Herodotus might have written, 'were the authors of the original
crime out of which this feud between the New World and the Old World arose. After
wantonly drawing upon themselves the Envy of the Gods by venturing to make their
way across an Ocean which no man-made ship had ever previously traversed, they pro¬
ceeded to provoke the Godhead further in another way by attacking and overthrowing
the empires of the Aztecs and the Incas, when these legitimate sovereigns of the New
World had never thought of committing aggression against the Old World on their part.
The wrong thus inflicted on the New World by Castilian hands was avenged by the
colonists planted there by the Castilians themselves and by the English, who rebelled
against their mother oiuntries, and thereby put an end to the Old World’s dominion
over the New World, in retaliation for the arbitrary action of a King of England named
George III in imposing a tax in his American dominions on the importation of an old-
world herb called tea, from which the colonists had learnt to brew a drink to take the
place of wine. This re-establishment of American independence would have balanced
the account between the two worlds if the equilibrium had not been upset again by the
intervention of the United States in the World War of a . d . 1914-18. The Americans
defend this intervention by arguing that they were acting in self-defence, on the ground
that, if they had allowed the Germans to win that war, then the Germans, who are
notoriously deficient in a sense of moderation, would never have been content with
having made themselves masters of the Old World but would have proceeded to mobi¬
lize all the Old World’s resources for an attack upon the New World in which the United
States would assuredly have lost her liberty. The Russians, on the other hand, argue
that, in intervening in the affairs of the Old World, the United States was committing an
act of aggression and that, since the overthrow of Germany in the Second World War,
the duty of championing the cause of the Old World has fallen on Russia’s shoulder*.
On this ground they maintain that their own recent occupation of the countries along
the Atlantic seaboard of the Old World, facing the United States, was not an act of
aggression on Russia’s part but was a necessary measure of precaution, taken in the
occupied countries' own interests, to forestall a further act of aggression against the Old
World which was to be expected from a United States which had committed two such
crimes already. This, then, was the origin of the Great Russo-American War, in which
all the forces of the Old World and the New World were arrayed against one another.'

1 It is perhaps worth noting that the Herodotean interpretation of 'the Trojan War*
as an episode in a feud between ‘Europe’ and ’Asia’ has no warrant in the Homeric Epic.
The authors of the two catalogues of the opposing forces (Iliad, Book II, 11 . 484-759 and
11 . 811-77) describe an Achaean confederacy astride the Aegean making war on a Trojan
coalition astride the Dardanelles; and, whatever the relation between these passages and
other parts of the poem may be held to be, there is at any rate no inconsistency between
them on this particular point of political geography.

7X0 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
been a rara avis. In another context 1 we have already observed that the
authentic motive for Darius’s forward policy was, not any romantic
impulse to pursue an imaginary feud, but the prosaic need to find a
tenable north-west frontier for the Achaemenian Empire in lieu of an
existing line which had been proved to be untenable by the painfully
cogent experience of the Asiatic Greek and Carian revolt of 499-494 b.c.
And, as for the theory of a perennial feud between ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’,
there is no serious evidence that the Persians of the Achaemenian Age
ever applied to such mundane matters as Geography, History, and
Civilization a capacity for thinking in abstract general terms which they
displayed in the transcendental sphere of a Zoroastrian theology that
concerned itself, not with a merely terrestrial Habitable World, but
with the Universe, and that made its grand dichotomy, not between
Asia and Europe or between Orientalism and Hellenism, but between
Light and Darkness and between Good and Evil.

The motive and the theory that Herodotus attributes to the Persians
were both manifestly invented by some Hellenic mind. The Hellenic
inventor was not Herodotus himself, for Asia is already a current
synonym for the Achaemenian Empire in Aeschylus’s Persae , 2 which
was produced for the first time in 472 B.C., and the same antithesis
between Asia and Europe reappears in Hellenic medical works of the
Hippocratcan school which were probably written in Herodotus’s own
generation. Nor docs Herodotus himself explicitly endorse an interpre¬
tation of history which he has borrowed from Hellenic predecessors
without acknowledgement and has attributed to Persian contemporaries
without permission. Yet, in effect, ‘the Feud between Europe and Asia’
is the dominant and unifying theme of Herodotus’s work, and the master¬
liness of his workmanship is largely responsible for the subsequent vogue
of this fifth-century Hellenic fantasy of a ‘quarrel of the continents’.

This fantasy had been begotten when some imaginative Hellenic
mind had given a revolutionary change of meaning to the two traditional
Hellenic geographical names ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ by transferring them
from the mariner’s chart to the publicist’s political map and to the
sociologist’s diagram of the habitats of cultures. This feat of imagination
had been unluckily inspired; for, though Herodotus was to turn it to
such good literary- account, it was, all the same, a fantasy that had
turned sense into nonsense. The mariner’s navigational distinction be¬
tween ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’, as far as it went, could have had as long a life
as the physical geography of the Quaternary Age of the planet’s geolo¬
gical history, whereas a constellation of political forces in which the
waterway between ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ coincided with a political frontier
had never arisen, from the dawn of recorded human history down to the
time of writing of the present work, except during the two brief periods
547 - 5 I 3 B - c - 3 an d 386-334 b.c., when this waterway constituted the
north-west frontier of the Achaemenian Empire. 4 As for the identifica-

1 Sec, tor example, 11. 12, 6i, 249, 270, 549, 584, 763, and 929.

1 See p. 43a, above.

4 It is true that the frontier of the Lydian Empire had gradually approximated towards
his water-line in the course of the century preceding Cyrus’* conquest of Lydia in

‘ASIA’ AND 'EUROPE' 7xx

tion of the mariner’s ‘continents’ with the domains of diverse cultures,
this was, if possible, even more fantastic than the political misapplica¬
tion of these nautical terms; for the historian cannot lay his finger on any
period at all, however brief, in which there was any significant cultural
diversity between ‘Asiatic’ and ‘European’ occupants of the all but
contiguous opposite banks of a tenuous inland waterway which would
have continued to be the fresh-water river that it originally had been if
Poseidon had not high-handedly enlarged his own domain by a mighty
trident-stroke that had brought the salt water flooding in, up the rift
which the god had cleft, from the mouth of the Aegean to the head of
the Sea of Azov . 1

Whatever the ultimate origins of the names ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ may
have been , 2 their usage as a pair of antithetical but mutually complemen¬
tary physiographical expressions must have been first brought into cur¬
rency by navigators of the Aegean who had succeeded in mastering the
challenge of ‘the estranging sea ’ 3 and who had consequently become
disagreeably aware of limitations set by terra firma to their freedom of
movement in an element which they had now made their own.

It is the mariner’s nomenclature that first draws the distinction be¬
tween his friends the islands, which offer him ports of call and harbours
of refuge, and his enemies the 'continents’ whose continuous coastline
disappointingly bars his passage, as gulf after gulf which promises to be
a strait turns out to be a cul-de-sac. The Hellenic mariner who had in¬
herited a mastery of the Aegean from Minoan predecessors could not
fail to note and name the two continents that proved to set an eastern
and a western bound to his sea-faring. Feeling his way northwards along
the Asiatic and the European coast of the mainland, he summoned up
the courage to hazard the passage of three successive straits—the

547 B.C.; but even Croesus, the last and widest-ruling of the Kings of Lydia, had never
succeeded in extending his dominions up to the continental Asiatic water-front nil along
the line. Miletus, the leading Continental Asiatic Greek city of the day, ns well as the
non-Greek-speaking Hellenic country; Lycia, had successfully maintained their in¬
dependence until, after the fall of Sardis, they had been compelled to submit to Lydia's
Persian conquerors. s See I. i. 326, n. 2.

1 The Aegean mariner’s term ‘Asia’ to denote the continent which set the eastward
limit to his freedom of movement in his own element appeared to have been derived from
the local name for a marsh or watermcad in the valley of the River Caysier, presumably
somewhere not far from its mouth (Iliad, Book 11, 1 . 461); and the documents retrieved
by Western archaeologists from the wreck of the Hittitc imperial archives at Boshaz-
aal'eh indicated that this Asian mead was called after the thirteenth-century West
Anatolian principality A 44 uwa. The etymology of the name ‘Europe’ was obscure. It
might be a Greek travesty of the Phoenician word ‘ertb (corresponding to the Arabic
gharb) meaning the dark quarter where the Sun sets in the West; or, if it was not a tech¬
nical term borrowed by Greek mariners from their Phoenician confreres, but was a native
Greek word, it might signify the ‘broad faced’ terra firma which had proved itself to
be a ‘continent’ by stretching away continuously without a break through which a ship
could thread its passage, in contrast to the islands of the Archipelago round whose
circumscribed coasts the Aegean mariner had learnt readily to find his way. This literal
interpretation of the word is perhaps too rational to be convincing, and another possi¬
bility is that the Continent of Europe may have derived its name from a goddess who
was ‘broad-faced’ because she was bovine. ‘The Tyrian princess Europa’ (Herodotus,
Book I, chap. 2) who had been abducted, according to the Hellenic myth, by Zeus in
the guise of a bull seems likely to have been a goddess in the guise of a cow, and we may
identify her, according to our fancy, with ’the cow-faced Hera’ or with the goddess
incarnate in a heifer whom the Hellenes knew as Io and the Egyptians as Hathor.

J The genesis of the Minoan Civilization has been traced back to a victorious response
to this physical challenge in I. i. 323-30.

712 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Dardanelles, the Bosphorus, and the Straits of Kerch—where Asia and
Europe all but clasped hands and threatened to crush between their
fingers the audacious ship that ventured to run the gauntlet. For each of
these daring transits the adventurous Hellenic mariners of the eighth
and seventh centuries b.C. were rewarded by finding their way into a new
Aegean in the shape of another inland sea; but, when they had thus
successively won their way from the Aegean into the Marmara, from the
Marmara into the Black Sea, and from the Black Sea into the Sea of
Azov, and had ascended the River Don to the head of fluvial navigation,
they there at last came to a point where their own clement finally failed
them and where the opposing continents, which had so far thrice
alternately converged and receded, at length lost their separate identities
by melting into one.

Even on the plane of physical geography, the mariner’s distinction
between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ made sense only so far as the physical effect
of Poseidon’s trident-stroke extended. The distinction could neither
have been invented nor even have been understood by a Nomad who
in his own peculiar element could range at will over a steppe which
afforded him passage without any appreciable break—when once he had
made his discovery of the waterless Dardanelles called the Zungarian
Gap—all the way between the eastern slopes of the Carpathians and the
western slopes of the Khingan Range. The distinction drawn between
an Asiatic and a European continent in an Hellenic nautical nomencla¬
ture would have been equally unintelligible to the Eurasian Nomad’s
northern neighbour and adversary the Eurasian peasant, whose element
was the belt of Black Earth extending from the eastern slopes of the
Carpathians to the western slopes of Altai. The sedentary cultivator of
the soil would have agreed with the nomadic herdsman in dismissing,
as the ineptitude that it was, an arbitrary division of his realm between
two continents invented in another region of the globe by alien seamen
for navigational purposes; and an Hcrodotcan ‘quarrel of the continents’
would have been brushed aside, as a meaningless irrelevancy, by a pair
of landsmen who were both intent on Cain’s and Abel’s historic conflict
between ‘the Desert’ and ‘the Sown’. 1

The boundary between the Hellenic mariners’ continents of Asia and
Europe was a navigable waterway, and this continuous channel of salt
water which carried their ships from the Aegean through the Dardanelles
and the Marmara and the Bosphorus and the Black Sea and the Straits
of Kerch came to an end at the head of the Sea of Azov. This last link
in a chain of inland seas still served to demarcate an Asia and a Europe
from one another; 1 but beyond that point the Hellenic geographers
never succeeded in laying their finger on any inland feature in the
physical landscape that could offer any convincing line for partitioning
an indivisible Eurasia which no Poseidonian trident-stroke had here
cleft asunder; and this problem of drawing a land-frontier between
Asia and Europe proved equally baffling to Modern Western geo-

» See III. iii. 7-22.

1 The Sea of Amv was the boundary between Asia and Europe according to Hippo¬
crates, Influences of Atmosphere, Water, and Situation, chap. 13.

‘ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE’ 713

graphcrs who had saddled themselves with this Hellenic intellectual
incubus as one of the penalties of profiting by a Modern Western
Renaissance of the corpus of Hellenic culture . 1

It was in vain that these Hellenomane Western geographers shifted
an imaginary boundary eastward from the line of the Don to the lines of
the Volga and the Caucasus, and subsequently followed the Russian
Empire’s military advance into Transcaucasia in order to find a boundary
between the continents of Europe and Asia in Russia’s fluctuating
political frontiers vis-a-vis Turkey and Persia . 2 Even this desperate
expedient of equating the bounds of a continent with transitory political
frontiers was of no avail to the perplexed geographers in the formidably
broad torso of Eurasia between the north shore of the Caspian and the
south shore of the Arctic Ocean; for on this front the political frontier of
Russia had long since rolled on eastward up to the shores of the Pacific
Ocean, and to have stretched the Continent of Europe, in Russia’s train,
to extend as far as Okhotsk and Vladivostok would merely have multi¬
plied the geographers’ embarrassments. They were reduced to dissecting
the living body politic of Russia into an imaginary ‘Russia-in-Europe’
and ‘Russia-in-Asia’ along the unconvincing line of the Ural River and
the Ural Mountains, and garnishing their fictitious ‘Russia-in-Asia’
with a non-existent political capital at Irkutsk for the edification of
school-children who would feel their geographical education incomplete
if they could not name a capital for every so-called state on the list
that they were given to learn by heart. Thereafter the geographers
belatedly discovered that the Ural Mountains which they had made into
a household word were no more noticeable a feature in the physical
landscape than the Chiltern Hills , 5 and that this vaunted physical barrier
between Europe and Asia was not strongly enough pronounced even to
serve as a boundary between one local province of the Russian Empire
and another . 4

The geographers’ dissection of Eurasia into a ‘Russia-in-Europe’ and
a ‘Russia-in-Asia’ was almost surpassed in fatuity by their dissection of
the Ottoman Empire into a 'Turkey-in-Europc (capital: Constantinople)’
and a ‘Turkey-in-Asia (capital: Smyrna)’; and they could not save their
reputation by pointing out that ‘European’ and ‘Asiatic’ Turkey, unlike
‘European’ and ‘Asiatic’ Russia, were physically demarcated from one
another by Poseidon’s salt-water-filled rift . 5 The geographers’ error here
lay in attempting to translate a serviceable piece of navigational nomen¬
clature into political and cultural terms. In the daily life of Hellenes
whose element was the sea, the salt water was a bond between continents

1 This is acknowledged by Oskar Halccki in The Limits and Divisions of European
History (I-ondon 1950. Sheed and Ward), p. 8s.

1 On this political principle of demarcating continents, the Transcaucasian districts
Qars, Ardahan, and Batum 'changed continents’ twice within forty years—from Asia
to Europe in a.d. 1878 and back again from Europe to Asia in a.d. 1918.

J On the 23rd January, 1930, the writer of this Study traversed the Urals tn route
across Eurasia from Vladivostok to Ostcnd via Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg), and found
them as unobtrusive as the Chiltems on the road from London to Oxford via High
Wycombe.

* This is acknowledged by Halccki, op. cit., p. 86.

s Halecki, in op. cit., pp. 75-76, acknowledges that the Straits do not sunder Europe
from Asia Minor.

Aa2

7 i 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
which were barriers to intercourse by navigation; and in the daily life of
latter-day inhabitants of Constantinople the Bosphorus was the central
thoroughfare of a city bestriding it. The twentieth-century Turkish
business man who worked ever}’ day in Pcra and slept every night in
Scutari would have been astonished to hear that the thalweg of the
familiar metropolitan waterway which he crossed in a penny steamer
twice a day on the way to and fro between his dormitory and his office
marked the boundary between two of the major divisions of the land-
surface of the globe, and that this thread of ‘salt estranging sea’ was so
potent an insulator that Scutari, Haydar Pasha, and the other ‘Asiatic’
quarters of the Bosphoran imperial city had a closer affinity with Calcutta
and Peking than they had with Pera and Istanbul, while conversely
Istanbul and Pera had a closer affinity with a ‘European’ Paris and
Madrid than they had with Haydar Pasha and Scutari.

No citizen of Constantinople could ever have been persuaded to
swallow such nonsense; for the Republic of Turkey which bestrode the
narrow seas between Asia and Europe at the time of writing was only
the latest of a series of states with the same geographical configuration.
In the political geography of the Ottoman Empire, the East Roman
Empire, the Roman Empire itself since the age of Diocletian and Con¬
stantine, and the abortive empire of Alexander the Great’s local suc¬
cessor Lysimachus, the waterway between the Aegean and the Black Sea
had proved itself to be the body politic’s spinal cord by attracting the
site of the seat of government to its shores. Lysimachus had laid out a
capital on the Dardanelles, in the neck of the Gallipoli Peninsula, for an
empire which he had momentarily extended to the Danube in one
direction and to the Taurus in the other. The capital of the Roman
Empire had gravitated from the banks of the Tiber to the shores of the
Marmara, 1 and Diocletian had governed the Hellenic World from
Nicomedia (Ismid) 2 before Constantine had converted Byzantium into
the Second Rome which an East Roman Empire and an Ottoman
Empire successively adopted as their capital.

When the East Roman Imperial Government at Constantinople was
overthrown by Western Christian adventurers in a . d . 1204, the Greek
Orthodox Christian resistance movement which immediately declared
itself at half a dozen places in the provinces found its most effective base
of operations at Nicaea, a provincial city which combined the political
advantage of proximity to the East Roman Empire’s central waterway
with the military advantage of being fortified by Nature as well as by
art. Nicaea, like the landward face of Istanbul, was encased in a triple
line of fortifications; a ring of mountains encircled the inland basin in
which the city lay; and the western half of this basin was filled by a lake
which drained through a defile into the Gulf of Cius (Gemlik) and thence
into the Sea of Marmara. The Greek Orthodox Christian principality
which was established at Nicaea in a.d. 1204 by the refugee patriot
Theodore Lascaris gave a practical demonstration of the working of local
laws of political geography which was not lost upon the ‘Osmanlis
when, 122 years later, these Turkish Muslim empire-builders gained
« See VI. vii. 119-20. * Sec VI. vii. 217-18.

•ASIA* AND 'EUROPE’ 715

possession of a neighbouring and comparable site at Brusa . 1 The
princes of Nicaea demonstrated between a . d . 1204 and a . d . 1261 that
a provisional capital within a stone’s throw of the Asiatic shore of the
Marmara afforded a practicable base of operations for a conquest
of Thrace and Macedonia which could then be rounded off by the
capture of a straits-bestriding empire’s inevitable ultimate capital at
Constantinople.

Nicaea and Brusa successively fulfilled their destinies by reinstating
Constantinople as the capital of an empire which these two temporary
queens of the narrow seas had built up for the benefit of their still more
auspiciously situated sister on the Bosphorus; but a twentieth-century
Republic of Turkey, whose capital was not Constantinople but Ankara,
had other predecessors which, like itself and unlike the Ottoman and
Palacologan empires, had bestridden the narrow seas without planting
the scat of government on their shores. The Dardanelles were thus be¬
stridden first by the Seleucid and then by the Pergamene successor-state
of the abortive empire of Lysimachus. Though both these Hellenic
empires, like the latter-day Republic of Turkey that emerged from the
wreckage of the Ottoman Empire after the World War of a . d . 1914-18
and like their own predecessor the Achaemenian Empire, were land-
powers centred on Asiatic ground and not sea-powers centred on the
Straits, the water-boundary between the continents of Asia and Europe
was too slight a barrier to provide them with ‘a natural frontier’; and
they both found it advisable, for the defence of their Asiatic dominions,
to hold a European bridgehead across the water.

The salt-water boundary between the mariner’s continents Asia and
Europe was as insignificant a feature on the cultural, ecclesiastical, and
ethnographical maps as it was on the political map.

The Aegean Sea was bestridden by the Hellenic World and by the
main body of the Orthodox Christian World since the first emergence of
each of these two societies, and by the Iranic Muslim World since the
Ottoman conquest of Rumelia in the fourteenth century of the Christian
Era. In the internal structure of the sea-faring Hellenic Society in its pre-
Alexandrine Age, the waters of the Aegean proved themselves to be, not
a barrier, but a bond by knitting together an Asiatic and a European
half of an indivisible Hellas as a European and an American half of an
indivisible Western World were knit together by the conductive waters
of the Atlantic in the ocean-faring age of Western history'; and, when
we turn to the ecclesiastical map, we find that the water-boundary
between Asia and Europe was crossed by religious missionaries as
readily as by military' conquerors.

In his two day's’ voyage from Troas to Neapolis , 2 Saint Paul, as we
have seen , 1 was following in the wake of Sclcucus Nicator and of Darius
the Great’s lieutenant Mardonius; and, some thirteen hundred years
later, Islam, in its turn, was propagated from Asia to Europe with equal
facility by Ottoman disciples of the Prophet Muhammad who pursued

« The Lascarids’ role as path-finders for the ‘Osmanlis has been noticed already in
III. iii. 27.

* Acts xvi. 11. > In VI. vii. 95-97-

716 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
the missionary’s aim by the conqueror’s methods. In the history of the
Eastern Orthodox Church the distinction between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’
was not merely meaningless but was positively misleading. A division of
the World’s land-surface into continents was inapplicable to the ecclesias¬
tical geography of a commonwealth of churches whose two oldest
members were an ‘Asiatic’ Patriarchate of Antioch and an ‘African’
Patriarchate of Alexandria, and whose senior member was an Oecumeni¬
cal Patriarchate of Constantinople in which ‘Asiatic’ and ‘European’
sees were indissolubly associated with one another, while the largest
and most powerful member of the group at the time of writing was a
Patriarchate of Moscow whose ecclesiastical subjects were scattered over
the face of an indivisible Eurasia from the shores of the Baltic Sea at
Leningrad to the shores of the Pacific Ocean at Vladivostok.

The linguistic map tells the same tale as the ecclesiastical, cultural,
and political maps at which we have just glanced. In the spread of
languages, as in the propagation of religions and cultures and the build¬
ing of empires, the narrow seas dividing an ‘Asia’ from a ‘Europe’ never
proved to be a barrier and frequently provided a highway. The waters
of the Aegean wafted the Greek language from the ‘European’ to the
‘Asiatic’ side of this conductive sea at least as early as the age of the
post-Minoan Vblkcrwandcrung (circa 1425-1125 B.C.). The Thracian¬
speaking peoples, who spread north-westward perhaps as far as Upper
Silesia af ter they had broken out of the Great Western Bay of the
Eurasian Steppe into the preserves of Homo Agricola , also spread south¬
eastward perhaps as far as North-Western Kurdistan 1 as easily as if the
continuity of the hills and dales over which they drove their flocks had
not been broken in this quarter by ‘the silver streaks’ of the Bosphorus
and the Dardanelles.

The ineffectiveness of the narrow seas as an obstacle to the spread of
the Thracian-speaking peoples was attested by the appearance of the
same Thracian tribal names on both the European and the Asiatic side.
There were Thyni on the Ismid Peninsula, as well as in the Istranja
Mountains overhanging the west shore of the Black Sea just across the
Bosphorus. The Phrygians of the Anatolian Plateau and Bcbryces of
the Qaramursal Peninsula on the Asiatic shore of the Marmara had left
a rear-guard in Europe whose name might have passed into oblivion 2
if these Macedonian Brygi had not once crossed the path of History by
falling foul of the Persian Mardonius’s expeditionary force in 492 b.c. 3
An equally obscure rear-guard of the Mysian occupants of the Asiatic
hinterland of the Marmara survived in a nook between the Balkans and
the Lower Danube to give their name to the Roman province Moesia.
Conversely, the Dardani whose main body had dug themselves in on
the watershed between the basins of the Morava and the Vardar in
the heart of the Balkan Peninsula had thrown an advance party into the

> See VI. vii. 604-5 and 660-2, and pp. 432-3, above. Herodotus (Book V, chap. 3)
estimated that the Thracians were the most numerous of all peoples with the sole excep¬
tion of the Indians.

1 Like the forgotten name of the European rear-guard of the Hittitcs who had blazed
the trail for the Phrygians in the second millennium B.C.

1 See Herodotus, Book VI, chap. 45.

‘ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE’ 717

Troad across straits that preserved the record of this tribal migration by
acquiring from it the name ‘Dardanelles’. 1

The Thracian-speaking peoples’ migration across the Straits in and
after a post-Minoan Volkerwanderung was emulated in the third century
B.c. by the Celtic-speaking peoples when a sudden diversion of Mace¬
donian arms from the conquest of the barbarian hinterland of European
Greece to the conquest of the Achaemenian Empire invited Celts, w’hom
Philip’s aggression had provoked, to take a hand in the scramble for
Alexander’s spoils; 2 and the ineffectiveness of the Straits as a barrier

K st a Volkerwanderung was attested once again by the appearance
e same tribal name Tectosages both in an Asiatic Galatia round
Ankara and in a European Gaul round Toulouse. Even after the bar¬
barians’ well-worn highway across the Straits had been obstructed by
the foundation of Constantinople, the Goths and the Slavs in turn
followed the trail of the Hittites and the Phrygians and the Gauls out of
Europe into Asia—as deportees, if not as conquerors—while in the
opposite direction a legendary feat of the Mysi and the Teucri 3 was
performed in real life by Ottoman Turkish migrants who conquered and
colonized Rumclia from an Anatolian base of operations in the fourteenth
century of the Christian Era.

The nullity of the Narrow Seas as a cultural barrier is demonstrated
so conclusively as to raise the question why it was that any Hellenes
should ever have thought of trying to find a dividing line between an
Hellenic and an Oriental World in a waterway which was actually the
link between the Hellenic World’s Asiatic and European provinces.
How did any school of Hellenic thought ever come to think of the
Aegean Sea, which was in reality the central thoroughfare of Hellas, as
demarcating her eastern boundary, when the effect of drawing a cultural
frontier along this line was to declare the Asiatic half of Hellas to be out
of the Hellenic World’s bounds? The explanation of this perverse cul¬
tural misinterpretation of a pair of nautical terms divorced from their
original context is perhaps to be discovered in an abnormal and tem¬
porary political situation which placed the Asiatic and the European
half of Hellas in an unfortunate relation with one another.

During the period between the conquest of the Continental Asiatic
Greek city-states by the Lydian Empire and the conquest of the Con¬
tinental European Greek city-states by Philip of Macedon, the European
Greeks were able to look down upon the Asiatic Greeks for having lost
their political independence, while the Asiatic Greeks could still look
down upon the European Greeks on the score of their relative cultural
backwardness; and it was not till after the opening of the post-Alcxan-

’• The Dardani who founded Dardanu* on the Hellespont (‘Dardanelles’) were pro¬
bably an Illyrian-speaking, not a Thracian-speaking, people, but their passage of the
Straits tells the same tale as the Thracian-speaking peoples’ migration across the same
narrow seas. * See II. n. 281 and V. v. 209.

1 See Herodotus, Book V, chap. 13, and Book VII, chap. 20. Presumably this legend
was founded on the appearance of the tribal name Mysi-Mocsi in both North-Western
Anatolia and the Balkan Peninsula. This pair of homonyms did commemorate a migra¬
tion; but the Hellenic observer who interpreted the evidence correctly thus far made the
mistake of assuming that the Asiatic Mysi must have been the progenitors of the Euro¬
pean Moesi because they happened to be the less insignificant of these two sister tribes
in the prc-Alcxandrine Age of Hellenic history.

718 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

drine Age that the superficiality of this temporary differentiation between
the two halves of Hellas once more became apparent. The truth was that
the Continental Asiatic Greek city-states lost their political indepen¬
dence to a Hellenized Lydia some 250 years before the Continental
European Greek city-states lost theirs to a Hellenized Macedonia just
because the Asiatic Greeks were culturally so much more precocious
than their European kinsmen that the radiation of their culture brought
the adjoining sub-Hellenic Kingdom of Lydia up to a level of cultural
efficiency at which it was politically capable of subjugating its Greek
spiritual pastors and masters about a quarter of a millennium before the
same stage was duly reached in the parallel history of the relations be¬
tween the European Greeks and the adjoining sub-Hellenic Kingdom of
Macedon. In the meantime the European Greeks could find a facile
psychological compensation for their oppressive consciousness of cul¬
tural inferiority to their Asiatic kinsmen by assuring themselves that the
Asiatic Greeks’ loss of a political independence which the European
Greeks had so far managed to retain was a proof that the Asiatic Greeks
w'erc decadent, and that, if such decadence was the price of sophistica¬
tion, 1 then the European Greeks' own ingenuousness was, on balance,
a happier state.

This legend of the Asiatic Greeks being decadent was disproved, as
we have noticed in another context, 2 by the sequel to Alexander’s over¬
throw’ of the Achaemenian Empire. This sequel showed that the eclipse
of Asiatic Greece between 494 and 334 b.c. had been due to the peculiarly
adverse situation in which the Asiatic Greeks had found themselves in
the Achaemenian Age. The Achaemenian conquest of Lydia and her
Continental Asiatic Greek dependencies in 547 B.c. meant something
much more serious for the Asiatic Greeks than just the replacement of
one foreign political ascendancy by another. It meant the substitution

1 Ore •musing symptom of the Asiatic Greeks’ continuing intellectual vitality in the
fifth century B.c. was the part played by Herodotus of Halicarnassus and by the Hippo-
cratean school of medicine in Co* in propagating the legend that the politically sub¬
jugated Asiatic Greeks were in some sense beyond the pale of a Hellas who was nowhere
quite fully herself except on the free soil of Europe. In putting into circulation a theory
that was uncomplimentary to their own half of Hellas, the fifth-century Asiatic Greek
men of science were giving evidence of their intellectual honesty, and at the same time
they displayed their intellectual acumen in the discrimination with which they inter¬
preted the theory in the light of the facts. In the Hippocratean treatise on Influences of
Atmosphere, Water, and Situation the thesis that the Asiatics are on the whole less brave,
tough, hard-working, and spirited than the Europeans is based (chap, ta), not on some
imaginary difference of magic virtue in the soil of the two continents, but on a general
theory’ of a correlation between physical environment and human ithos (sec the passages
quoted from op. cit. f chaps. 13 and 24, in II. i. 251-2). The Hippocratean argument
starts from the premiss that in Asia the physical environment is more benign than it is
in Europe; and, on the Hippocratean hypothesis that hard countries breed strong charac¬
ters, it follows that the inhabitants of Asia are less warlike than those of Europe on the
whole (chaps. 12 and 23). At the same time the variety of the physical environment in
Europe breeds a variety in the physique of the European peoples (chaps. 23 and 24),
while a variety in the <thos of the Asiatic peoples is produced by the variety in Asiatic
political conditions. The relative unwarlikeness of a majority of the Asiatics is due not
merely to the relative benignity of the Asiatic physical environment but also to the
political fact that most Asiatics live under a monarchical regime which deprives them of
the incentive to exert themselves and risk their lives. 'The Hellenes and non-Hellenes
in Asia who are not under despotic rule, but are free agents and struggle for their own
benefit, are as warlike as any populations in the World’ (op. cit., chap. 16, quoted in II.
i. 471. n. 1). * In IV. iv. 20-23.

‘ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE’ 719

of Persian masters who were barbarian converts to an alien civilization
for Lydian masters who had been the conquered Hellenes’ own cultural
disciples; and the Asiatic Greeks merely kept on falling out of the frying
pan into the fire when their Attic European kinsmen ‘liberated’ them
from an Achaemcnian yoke in 479 b.c. and when their Spartan European
kinsmen replayed this comedy by ‘liberating’ them from an Athenian
yoke in the last phase of the Athcno-Pcloponnesian War of 431-404 B.c.
in order to sell them back to the Achaemenidae in 386 B.c. As soon as
the new order of the post-Alexandrine Age had released the Asiatic
Greeks from the peculiar tribulations to which they had been subject
during the preceding quarter of a millennium, the brilliant success with
which they immediately rose to the occasion showed that their vitality
was unimpaired. From 334 b.c. down to the generation of Justinian
the Asiatic Greeks played as prominent a part in the life of the Hellenic
World as they had played before the generation of Cyrus.

In the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic history the thesis that the
conflict between Hellenism and the Oriental civilizations was a feud
between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ was once more so plainly contradicted by
the facts that it fell into oblivion and ceased to work mischief, but the
ghost of an erroneous Hellenic theory which had been effectively dis¬
credited by the logic of events in its Hellenic birthplace unfortunately
returned to haunt a Modern Western World which had laid itself open
to this visitation by its reception of the Hellenic culture in a fifteenth-
century Italian Renaissance. In this new setting, History repeated itself
with a singular exactness. A revival of the Hellenic concept of 'con¬
tinents’ which was innocuous so long as this concept was employed only
in its proper nautical context bred a fresh crop of trouble when the
nautical terminology was once again diverted to a cultural usage.

The Modern Westerners who adopted and adapted the Hellenic
mariners’ geographical terminology were the peoples on the eastern
shores of the Atlantic, from Castile and Portugal northwards, who opened
a new chapter in both Western history and World history by mastering
the art of oceanic navigation at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries of the Christian Era; and the Hellenic terminology proved still
to make nautical sense in a situation in which making the sea passage
between Europe and Asia meant not just swimming across the Darda¬
nelles or ferrying over the Aegean but circumnavigating Africa now that
the banks of the Narrow Seas which divided Asia from Europe by a hair’s
breadth had been placed out of bounds for Western maritime enterprise
by the establishment of the Ottoman Empire astride those inland sea¬
waters.

On the oceanic chart drawn by Western navigators in a Modern Age
of Western history, ‘Europe’ meant the hinterland of the mariners’ own
home ports from Cadiz to Trondhjem and Helsingfors; ‘Asia’ meant
the hinterland of another chain of ports, stretching from Maskat and
Hormuz to Canton and Nagasaki, which the conquest of the Ocean had
brought within the Western mariners’ range; and ‘Africa’ meant the
huge peninsula, jutting out from the south shore of the Straits of
Gibraltar to the Cape of Good Hope, which had to be rounded by

720 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
travellers between Europe and Asia who were debarred by political
obstacles from short-circuiting the circumnavigation of the Dark Con¬
tinent by using the overland routes across the Bosphorus and the
Dardanelles or the portages across Egypt and South-West Asia between
the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. This oceanic application of an
Aegean nautical terminology fitted all the newly discovered geographical
facts that had swum into the Western mariners’ ken; 1 but the Modem
Western geographers entangled themselves in their turn in the intellec¬
tual and moral toils that had caught their Hellenic predecessors when
they set themselves to give the continents a cultural as well as a nautical
meaning.

In taking the nautical term ‘Europe’ to serve as a substitute for the
cultural term ‘Western Christendom’, the Modern Westerners could
plead an excuse which the Hellenes could not have pleaded when they
tentatively identified ‘Europe’ with ‘Hellas’ in the fifth century B.c. The
Hellenic misuse of the name ‘Europe’ was the more wanton of the two
misnomers, because ‘Hellas’ or to 'EXXrjuiKov was always a perfectly
serviceable label for the Hellenic Society from the beginning to the end
of its history, whereas the Modern Westerners found themselves awk¬
wardly at a loss, by the end of the seventeenth century, for a collective
name to designate their own society and culture. The traditional name
‘Western Christendom’ had ceased to be applicable when, within less

1 This Modem Western chart of the continents in an oceanic setting justified retro¬
spectively the enumeration of a separate continent of ‘Africa' which its Hellenic in¬
ventors had never quite succeeded in distinguishing from 'Asia'. The Hellenes had
been enticed into inventing this Continent of Africa (Grate! Libya) by their passion
for symmetry. On the Hellenic chart of the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean, the
mouths of the Nile faced the mouths of the Aegean; and, if the thalweg of the sea-
drowned river of which the Aegean was the lowest reach marked the boundary between
Asia and Europe, the law of geographical symmetry required that the thalweg of the Nile
should similarly demarcate Asia from another continent which could be labelled 'Libya'
by an extension of the usage of the name of the country’ adjoining Egypt on the west.
This Hellenic sailors’ distinction between an ‘Asiatic’ and a 'Libyan' bank of the Nile
would have made sense for a Nile boatman, but not for an Egyptian whose business it
was to think, not in narrow terms of navigation, but in broad terms of culture. On the
cultural map the Nile waterway was, of course, the spinal cord of the Egyptiac World, as
the Aegean Sea was the heart of Hellas. A subsequent increase in geographical know¬
ledge led the Hellenic geographers to set back the western boundary’ of Asia from the
east bank of the Nile to the east coast of the Red Sea; but a still uncut Isthmus of Suez
presented them, on a miniature scale, with the same insoluble geographical problem as
the vastly broader isthmus between the head of the Sea of Azov and the Hyperborean
shore of Ocean Stream, and their eventual discovery that 'Libya' was circumnavigable
made them still more doubtful about the legitimacy of trying to erect ‘Libya’ into a
separate continent instead of treating it as a mere peninsula of Asia. It was left to Modern
Western ocean-faring navigators to demonstrate that, on a marine chart, ‘Africa’ had a
much better claim than 'Europe' had to rank as something more than a mere excres¬
cence of Asia. From the cultural standpoint, or. the other hand, the concept of 'Africa’
never made any more sense than the concept of 'Europe’ or of 'Asia'. Africa north of the
Sahara, which was insulated culturally from Tropical Africa by an estranging desert,
was linked up culturally with South-W est Asia and Southern Europe by the conductive
waters of the Mediterranean Sea—as was attested at the time of writing by the distri¬
bution of the Arabic language and culture and of the metropolitan territory- of France.
The Hellenic geographers' misgivings about the feasibility of distinguishing an ‘Africa’
from an ‘Asia were justified by the configuration of a latter-day Arabic W orld which
stretched across South-West Asia and North Africa from ‘Iraq to Morocco inclusive
without a break. The administrative organization of Algeria to constitute three French
departments which ranked juridically as an integral part of France herself was a political
testimony to the geographical fact that, whatever the mariner’s chart might say, the
Maghrib was for practical purposes a European, not an African, country.

‘ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE’ 721

than half a century of the opening of the modern chapter of Western
history, the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation had split the
Western World in two on the ecclesiastical plane; 1 and the retention
of the word ‘Christendom’ in the tide of the Western World had become
still more incongruous when, after the close of the Wars of Religion,
the Westerners—Catholics and Protestants alike—had deliberately
sloughed off their society’s traditional chrysalis and had proceeded to
propagate their culture all over the face of the planet in a dehydrated
secular abstract of its original plenary form.

When the Western Society’s historic name had thus been made
obsolete by the early modern course of Western history, the Hcllenistic-
minded spokesmen of a Modern Western culture consulted their
familiar Hellenic oracles for guidance in their search for a convenient
alias for a ‘Christendom’ that had become an awkward terminological
anachronism in the vocabulary of a post-Christian Western World. 1
The Hellenes’ geographical concept of a terra finna articulated into
‘continents’ had served the Hellenes’ Modem Western disciples well
when they had adopted this Hellenic pattern of geographical thought in
its original nautical usage. Why not follow a step farther in the Hellenic

S raphers’ traces by giving the names of the continents a cultural as
as a navigational connotation ? Reinterpreted on this Hellenic pre¬
cedent, the name ‘Europe’ offered an alias for the name ‘Christendom’
that was free from the old name’s now misleading religious associations.
The Western minds that put this Herodotean cultural usage of the word
‘Europe’ into circulation in the Modern Western World might be for¬
given for having failed to perceive that in taking this way of extricating
themselves from one awkward plight they were implicating themselves
in another; but, however excusable their error of judgement might be,
its intellectual and moral consequences for both the West and the World
were as unfortunate as if these coiners of a secular name for a de¬
consecrated Western Christendom had been actuated by malice prepense.

The most glaring intellectual weakness of this unlucky usage was that
it was a desperate geographical misfit. A Western World that was now
calling itself ‘Europe’ had-never embraced the whole of the European
continent up to the water boundaries assigned to it in the original
Hellenic nautical usage of the word, while on the other hand the West
had already expanded overseas into regions which could not be deemed
to be parts of Europe on any reading of the map.

The quarter of Europe which was indisputably entitled to bear the
name was the European hinterland of the shores of the chain of narrow
seas running up from the mouth of the Aegean to the head of the Sea
of Azov. This had been the first quarter of the continent to which the
name ‘Europe’ had ever been applied; but this south-eastern nucleus of
Europe had always lain outside the bounds of the Western World in the
medieval as well as in the modern chapter of Western history; it had
lain, and still lay, within the domain of the main body of Eastern Ortho¬
dox Christendom; and an abortive Medieval Western Christian attempt

« This point has been noticed already in I. i. 33-34.

» See Halecki, op. cit., p. 51.

722 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
to annex that alien Christian body social to Western Christendom had
defeated its own purpose by resulting in the establishment of Ottoman
Muslim rule over the European as well as the Asiatic provinces of
Orthodox Christendom with the exception of Russia. 1 A Modern
Western World which thus fell short of being conterminous with Europe
in one direction had, however, burst the bounds of Europe in another
direction when it had inaugurated the opening of the modern chapter of
Western history by the historic act of mastering the Ocean; 2 and an
ocean-borne expansion of a hitherto merely West European society over
the whole face of the planet, which had been initiated in and after the
turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era on
the economic and political planes, was extended, as we have seen, 3 to the
cultural plane as well, as soon as a former religious impediment to a
reception of the Western culture by non-Westcm societies had been
removed by the action of the Westerners themselves in secularizing
their way of life at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
As a label for the domain of the Western Civilization from that date
onwards, the name ‘Europe’ was thus on the one hand too narrow to
cover the West’s thenceforth rapidly expanding non-European cultural
empire, while on the other hand it was too broad to be reconcilable with
the no less pertinent fact that South-Eastern Europe still lay outside the
Western Society’s cultural bounds.

This inapplicability to South-Eastern Europe of the Modern Western
usage of the word ‘Europe’ as an alias for the Modern Western World
not only made intellectual nonsense of the cultural situation in that
culturally non-Western quarter of a ‘continent’ that had no unity, and
indeed had no existence, in any other setting than a mariner’s chart;
this Modern Western usage of die word ‘Europe’ as a synonym for the
West also made moral mischief by suggesting to self-confident and
self-righteous Modem Western minds the preposterous implication
that the cultural diversity of South-Eastern Europe from the western
extremity of ‘the European Continent’ was the monstrous outcome of
a scandalous miscarriage of History which could be, and should be, put
right by some benevolently high-handed exercise of Modern Western
power. In drawing this misguided moral from an erroneous interpreta¬
tion of the facts, the Modern West was adopting an attitude towards the
contemporary Islamic and Orthodox Christian worlds that was bound
to breed mutual misunderstanding and ill-feeling.

The Modern Western assumption that South-Eastern Europe was
part of the Western Civilization’s patrimony ex officio, in virtue of the
West’s unauthorized appropriation of the name ‘Europe’ as a label for
itself, was a ‘geopolitical’ dogma that was irreconcilable with the histori¬
cal facts; yet the evidence of the facts did not deter nineteenth-century
Western Liberals from pronouncing pontifically that the Turks were
trespassers in Rumelia, 4 and that a fortiori these interlopers had no

1 See pp. 151-2, 362, and 395-7, above.

1 Thi» point is noticed by Halccki in op. cit., pp. 51 and 54.

) On pp. 516-18, above.

4 ‘Rumili’, the Turkish name for Turkey-in-Europc’, meant 'the land of Orthodox
Christendom’ (Turcici ‘Rem’, signifying the [East] Roman Empire). If South-Eastern

‘ASIA* AND ‘EUROPE’ 723

business to bear rule there, because they were ‘Asiatics’, not ‘Europeans’,
in origin. These impulsive Gladstonians clamoured for the expulsion of
die Turkish intruders from Europe 'bag and baggage’ 1 without ever
taking the trouble to put their draconian programme to the proof of
confronting it with the elementary facts of Ottoman history. These facts
were that the Ottoman Empire, like its forerunner the Greek Orthodox
Christian Principality of Nicaea, had expanded over the European
territories of Orthodox Christendom from a starting-point on Asiatic
Orthodox Christian ground because it had a political and a social
mission to perform for the whole of the main body of Orthodox Christen¬
dom on both sides of the Straits. Eastern Orthodox Christians had
acquiesced in Ottoman Muslim rule, in preference to Western Christian
rule, because their Ottoman conquerors had shown themselves capable
of imposing peace on a distracted Orthodox Christendom whose confu¬
sion had merely been worse confounded by the escapades of the Western
Crusaders.

In the nineteenth century of the Christian Era no less than in the
fourteenth, the acid test for passing judgement on the Ottoman regime
was the current state of the account between the benefits conferred by
the Pax Ottomanica on the Padishah’s subjects and the cost of the
oppression that was the price of an Ottoman Peace; and in the nineteenth
century an impartial judge might well have pronounced that the Porte
had exhausted its mandate; but this verdict would have conferred a
moral claim to liberation from an Ottoman Turkish yoke, not just upon
the Porte’s non-Turkish subjects in ‘Turkey-in-Europc’, but upon all
its non-Turkish subjects, whatever religion they professed and whatever
language they spoke and whatever continent they inhabited. A dis¬
credited Ottoman Turkish imperial people’s African and Asiatic Arabic¬
speaking Sunni Muslim co-religionists would have had the same good
case for demanding liberation as the European Orthodox Christians,
and the Asiatic Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians and Maronites
and Druses the same good case as the European Albanian-speaking
Tosk and Serbo-Croat-speaking Bosniak Sunnis. The test was the
current balance-sheet of the Ottoman regime, and the issue was a sub¬
ject’s moral claim to be liberated from a regime that had forfeited its
moral title to rule. In this moral issue the query whether the victim of
misgovernment happened to be domiciled in the European, the Asiatic,
or the African dominions of its discredited oppressors was pedantically
irrelevant; and no approach to the nineteenth-century problem of the

Europe had been Western and not Orthodox Christian ground at the time when the
'Osmanlis occupied it, they would have called it, not 'Rumili', but ‘Feringhistan’
('Frankland').

» 'Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by
carrying off themselves. Their zaptiehs and their mudirs, their bimbashis and their
yuzbashis, their kaimakams and their pashas, one and all, shall, I hope, clear out from
the province they have desolated and profaned' (Gladstone, W. E.: Bulgarian Horrori
and the Question of the East (London 1876, John Murray), p. 31).

'The profaned and desolated province' of this celebrated passage was not the whole
of Turkey-in-Europe but only that portion of Rumelia that was inhabited by the Bulgars;
but the more sweeping programme proclaimed in the simpler slogan ‘Expel the Turks
from Europe’ was the ultimate objective of Gladstone and his fellow Turcophobes in a
nineteenth-century Western World that had identified 'Europe' with itself.

724 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
Ottoman Empire’s future could well have been more perverse than the
Modern Western Liberal publicist’s uncritical adoption of the Herodo-
tean fantasy of a perennial feud between 'Europe’ and ‘Asia’—as if the
‘European’ subjects of the Ottoman Porte were entitled to liberation, not
on a moral ground which was equally applicable to their ‘African’ and
‘Asiatic’ fellow victims, but on the geographical score of being in¬
habitants of a privileged continent. 1

The Modern Western identification of the Western World with
‘Europe’, which had this distorting effect on Western policy towards the
Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, persisted into the twentieth
century to exacerbate an ideological quarrel between the West and a
Communist Russia.

The self-deconsecration of the Western World towards the close of
the seventeenth century of the Christian Era did not bring with it any
essential change in the traditional Western attitude towards Orthodox
Christendom. Since the establishment of a Western military, political,
and economic ascendancy over the main body of Orthodox Christendom
in the sequel to the collapse of the East Roman Power, the Medieval
Westerners had come to look upon their Eastern Orthodox neighbours,
no longer as their superiors or even as their peers, but as obstinately
unsatisfactory poor relations who must be coerced into making a public
confession of sin and profession of repentance, in the form of a solemn
acknowledgement of the Papacy’s ecclesiastical supremacy over the
churches of the Greek Rite, as a condition sine gud non for being con¬
sidered eligible for receiving Western aid. A latter-day post-Christian
Western Society which could no longer logically condemn the ‘native
Christian’ subjects of the Ottoman Empire as religious heretics could
still preserve and justify a traditional Western contempt for them by
censuring them as ‘Europeans’ who had inexcusably failed to keep
up with ‘the progress of European Civilization’. This censure was
tantamount to a reiteration, in Modern Western secular terms, of the
Medieval Western Christian demand that the Orthodox Christians
should renounce their own traditional culture and should adopt in its
place the contemporary culture of the West. The weak point in the latter-
day Western ‘geopolitical’ formula for taking Orthodox Christendom to
task was that a majority of those indicted for the moral offence of being

1 The fantasy that the evil of nineteenth-century Ottoman misgovemment would be
cured by expelling the Turks from ‘Europe’ would have been reduced ad abtvrdum if
this programme had ever become practical politic*. The partition of the Eurasian city
of Constantinople by a political frontier following the thaliceg of the Bosphorus would
have been one of the curiosities of political map-making even for a generation that had
lived to see the bisection of Jerusalem and Vienna and Berlin after the World War of
A.D. 1919-745. One quaint result of applying the fantastic ‘geopolitical’ principle that
political liberty was a European privilege would have been to disqualify the chief in¬
tellectual leader of a Modern Greek Westernizing movement that had expressed it¬
self politically in the partially successful Greek uprising against Ottoman rule in A.D.
1821. Till the great Greek exodus from Anatolia and Eastern Thrace in and after a.d.
1922, the Modem Greeks, like the Ancient Greeks before them, were caually at home
on the European and on the Asiatic side of the Aegean; und Adhamlndtos Korais %vas
in no way peculiar among the Modem Greeks of his generation in being a Smymiot of
Chiot origin (see pp. 178-9, above). This eminent scholar-patriot would have been as sur¬
prised to be told that his Asiatic provenance made him ineligible for liberation from
Ottoman rule as he would have been to hear that his Arabic surname (see p. 178, n. 4,
above) debarred him from being reckoned as a Greek.

■ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE' 725

‘lapsed Europeans’ were actually not inhabitants of Europe on any
defensible definition of the boundaries of that elusive continent. Half the
Modern Greek people lived in Asia, while the whole of Russia defied the
most determined efforts of geographical pedantry to partition her be¬
tween an ‘Asia’ and a ‘Europe’ that melted into one another round the
head of the Sea of Azov.

The self-secularization of the West thus left the Western attitude
towards Orthodox Christendom essentially unchanged, but it did never¬
theless temporarily relieve the tension between the two sister societies
by changing the Orthodox Christian peoples’ feeling towards the West
from an invincible repugnance to a frank admiration. The seventeenth-
century distillation of a secular abstract of the Western culture was
promptly followed, as we have seen,' by a movement in Orthodox
Christendom to adopt this attractive as well as anodyne new form of a
previously repulsive alien civilization; and this spontaneous Greek,
Serb, and Russian imitation of a latter-day secular Western way of life
was, of course, flattering to the Westerners’ self-conceit. The Tsar Peter
Romanov’s exemplary good conduct half persuaded the Western dominie
to forget the bad mark inscribed in his black book against the name of
the Oecumenical Patriarch Michael Cerularius, and the next two cen¬
turies of Orthodox Christian cultural history confirmed in Western
minds this reassuring impression that the truant ‘East Europeans’ had
at last seen the light and turned over a new leaf. The dismay and indigna¬
tion in the West were therefore proportionately extreme when in aj>.
1917 Russia suddenly deviated from the broad way leading to Western¬
ization which she had been following since the close of the seventeenth
century, and when she added insult to injury by resuming her pre-
Petrine ideological war against the West in the name, no longer of Chris¬
tian Orthodoxy, but of a post-Christian heresy of Western origin. An
impartial judge of the issue between the Russian version of Communism
and the contemporaryWestern way of life might perhaps have given judge¬
ment against the Russian party to the suit, but he certainly would not have
found an aggravating circumstance in Russia’s alleged apostasy from an
imaginary' ‘European Civilization’ which would have had no geographical
claim on Russia’s allegiance even if it had had any existence in real life.

This mirage of a ‘European Civilization’ was another hallucination to
which Modern Western Man condemned himself when he appropriated
the word ‘Europe’ as a name for a deconsecrated Western World. His
cultural misapplication of a nautical term inevitably led him into nvo
historical aberrations. One of these was the notion that Orthodox
Christendom and Western Christendom constituted a single society
because their geographical domains, taken together, were deemed to be
coextensive with the limits of the mariner’s European continent. The
second aberration was the notion that Hellenic history and Western
history were—not distinct social experiences that might be philosophi¬
cally contemporaneous as well as philosophically equivalent in value 2 —

* On pp. 132-3 and 161-5 above.

1 For these two conceptions of the mutual relations between societies of the species
called civilizations, see 1. i. 172-7.

726 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES
but historically continuous as well as chronologically successive acts in
a single European drama which was deemed to be a unity in virtue of
its having the wonder-working soil of a privileged continent as its scene
of action throughout the play. This ‘European’ rendering of Western
and Orthodox Christian and Hellenic history could not face the music
of the historical facts.

The thesis that the Western and Orthodox Christian cultures were
not two cultures but one culture in virtue of their combined domains
being coextensive with ‘Europe’ had found one of its ablest advocates,
down to the time of writing, in a distinguished twentieth-century Polish
historian. 1 In his exposition of this theme, Halecki strengthens his case
by conceding that Europe had been an intelligible field of historical
study only during a limited period that was admittedly already at an end
by the date at which the European author was writing his book as an
exile in America. 1 The European Age, as Halecki defines it, was both
followed and preceded by an age in which the intelligible field of study,
instead of being delimited by the coasts of a continent, was constituted
by the shores of a land-locked Sea. In Halccki’s view the European Age
had succeeded a Mediterranean Age 3 and was being succeeded by an
Atlantic Age. 4 The making of Europe had been completed in the second
half of the tenth century of the Christian Era, when Poland, Hungary,
and the Scandinavian countries had been converted to Western Chris¬
tianity and Russia converted to Orthodox Christianity. 5 The destruction
of Europe had been completed in the fifth decade of the twentieth cen¬
tury, when the eastern half of the continent had been severed from the
West by the descent of a Soviet Russian ‘iron curtain’—a catastrophe
that had been as lethal for Europe as the Primitive Muslim Arab con¬
quest of South-West Asia and North Africa in the seventh century had
been lethal for an antecedent Mediterranean World. 6 The transition
from the Mediterranean to the European Age had been a gradual pro¬
cess, and the eventual transition from the European to the Atlantic Age
had been more gradual still. 7 In round numbers of centuries, however,
Halecki dates his European Age between a.d. 950 and a . d . 1950. 8

This is a moderate and persuasive presentation of the case for giving
the word ‘Europe’ a cultural connotation in addition to its plain nautical
meaning. Yet even Halccki’s presentation is vulnerable. For example,
the assumption that, in ‘the European Age’, the combined areas of an
Orthodox and a Western Christendom were conterminous with Europe
is one that will not bear examination. During the first century of Halecki’s
European millennium, the centre of gravity of Orthodox Christendom
still lay outside Europe, in an Anatolian Peninsula known as ‘Asia
Minor’, 9 while a 'Europa Minor’ in the shape of the Iberian Peninsula
lay outside the domain of Western Christendom, in Dar-al-Islam. On
the second of these two points, Halecki might perhaps reply that, in the

1 Oskar Halecki, in The Limits and Divisions 0] European History (London 1950,
Sheed and Ward). » See op. cit., p. 10.

1 See ibid., p. 29. * See ibid., p. 54.

* See ibid., pp. 39-40. Cp. pp. 28-29 and 36-37.

‘ASIA’ AND 'EUROPE' 727

Iberian Peninsula in that century, the majority of the population seems
still to have consisted of an Arab and Berber Muslim dominant minority’s
musta'rib Western Christian subjects; but this rejoinder will not revali¬
date his thesis that, during 'the European millennium', Europe and
Christendom were coextensive; for, even if, during the first half of that
millennium, Western Christendom was confined within Europe’s coasts,
Orthodox Christendom continued to straddle the Aegean Sea and the
Straits, with one foot in Europe and the other in Asia, until the exodus
of Orthodox Christians from Anatolia in a.d. 1922, while, during the
second half of the same millennium, when Western Christendom was
spreading into the New World, Orthodox Christendom’s Russian off¬
shoot spread right across the breadth of Asia till it reached the western
shore of the Pacific and leaped over the Behring Straits into the Alaskan
Peninsula of North America.

Moreover, the Orthodox and the Western Christendom were only
two out of four sectors into which the circular wave of Christianity had
come to be articulated in the course of its expansion. 1 The Roman sector
in Western Europe and the Orthodox sector in Eastern Europe and Ana¬
tolia were balanced by a Monophysite sector extending from Armenia to
Abyssinia inclusive through Syria and the Nile Valley and by a Ncstorian
sector extending from ‘Iraq to the north-east corner of Intramural
China; and neither of these two other quarters of Christendom had any
foothold in Europe. During the first 250 years of Halccki’s European
millennium, before the mass-conversions to Islam on the eve of the fall
of the ‘ Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, a Monophysite Christendom that
still embraced the peasantry of Egypt and a Ncstorian Christendom that
still embraced the peasantry of ‘Iraq were perhaps each of them as
strong in numbers as either their Orthodox or their Western sister
Christian society; and, when the whole of Christendom, instead of
merely two arbitrarily selected quarters of it, 2 is thus taken into account,
it becomes manifest that either Asia or Africa could have disputed
Europe’s claim to style herself ‘the Christian Continent’ par excellence
until at least the first four out of Halecki’s ten European centuries had
run out. If there was a moment—between the late medieval decline of
the Monophysite and Nestorian Christian waves in Africa and Asia and
the early modern advance of the Orthodox and Western Christian waves
into Asia and the Americas—at which Christendom and Europe were in
truth approximately conterminous, that moment cannot have had a
longer duration than the hundred years immediately preceding the
Western mariners’ conquest of the Ocean in the later decades of the
fifteenth century. Yet, even during that brief interval, the identity be¬
tween Europe and Christendom was imperfect; for, in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries of the Christian Era, an Islam that was still

* See II. ii. 360-9.

1 Halecki’s arbitrariness in deeming an Orthodox and a Western Christendom to
constitute n unitary Christian society, to the exclusion of both a Monophysite and a
Nestorian Christendom, is capped by his arbitrariness in excluding Muscovy, and
a fortiori the Soviet Union, from a Europe which, for him, is synonymous with Christen¬
dom, when he has bestowed the freedom of Europe on Muscovy’s predecessor Kievan
Russia (op. cit., p. 92), as well as on a predominantly Anatolian East Roman Empire
(op. cit., p. 93).

728 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

clinging to a remnant of its own domain in a European Andalusia was
already encroaching on Christendom’s domain in a European Rumclia
as well as in an African Nubia' and in an Asiatic Tr 5 q and Azerbaijan. 1

While Europe thus failed to provide a geographical framework for the
merger of Orthodox with Western Christendom in a single unitary
Christian Civilization, it likewise failed to provide an historical frame¬
work for the merger of an Hellenic with a post-Christian Western cul¬
ture in a single unitary' Rationalist Civilization. The thesis that the
Western and Hellenic cultures were not two cultures but one culture
because they were both alike informed by some common distinctive
quality that could be identified as being ‘European’ was one that could
be sustained only if this hypothetical common ‘European’ quality could
be shown to have been not merely distinctive but dominant in a soi-
disant ‘European’ cultural tradition; and this condition in its turn re¬
quired that, if any non-European contributions to this European cultural
heritage could be detected, they should prove to be elements that were not
of more than minor importance. It is evident that the thesis refutes itself
as soon as it is thus elucidated; for it wrecks itself on two rocks at once:
the Jewish contribution to a Western Civilization that was a Christian
civilization as well as a Hellenistic one, and the Asiatic Greek contribu¬
tion to Hellenism. The Asiatic Greeks, as we have seen, had been the
pioneers of the Hellenic Civilization in the first chapter of its history-,
and Ionian Asiatic Greek men of science had been the intellectual fathers
of a Rationalism which was taken by Modern Western minds to be the
unbroken golden thread of a ‘European’ cultural tradition, 3 but this
latter-day Western belief in a ‘rationalist’ civilization’s continuity was
achieved at the intellectual price of ignoring the spiritual history of the
Hellenic World after the generation of Carneadcs 4 and the spiritual
history of the Western World before the generation of Descartes.

A distortion of the historical facts which the chimaera of a ‘European
Civilization’ demanded from its votaries was aggravated by the hybris
which was the moral nemesis of this intellectual error. The Modern
Western Narcissus who had once persuaded himself to believe in the
reality of a distinctive ‘European’ tradition of civilization culminating
in the way of life of the observer’s own society in his own age was apt
to lose his balance so completely as to equate this imaginary ‘European
Civilization’ with ‘Civilization’ satis phrase and to deny the title to rank
as civilizations to representatives of this species of society whose geo¬
graphical domains happened to lie on the wrong side of the Argonauts’
track. 5 A Modern Westerner who had ruled all non-Europeans out of

< Sec Trimingham, J. S.: Islam in the Sudan (Oxford 1949, University Press), pp.
79-84.

1 Sec Budge, E. A. Wallis: The Monks of Kiiblai Khan (London 1928, Religious Tract
Society), pp. 76-88.

J A characteristically judicious and discriminating statement, by Edwyn Bcvan, of
the cue for regarding Hellenic and Western history as the history- of a single 'rationalist’
civilization will be found in V. v. 6, n. J.

4 The metamorphosis of Hellenic philosophy into religion from the generation of
Poseidonius onwards has been noticed in V. v. 546-9.

» The geopolitical counier-manceuvre of equating 'Civilization' with 'Asiatic Civiliza¬
tion’ would have been equally facile and, of course, equally illegitimate. On the analogy
of the Modem Western manoeuvre that has been exposed above, this counter-manoeuvre

•ASIA’ AND 'EUROPE’

729

his reckoning of human achievement was indeed in danger of finding
himself in a dizzy position. Now that he had piled his Western Pelion
on an Hellenic Ossa, must he not be on the verge of scaling Olympus?
The catastrophic ending of the Titans’ impious enterprise according to
the traditional version of the Hellenic myth gave a sardonic answer to
the Westerner's conceited rhetorical question. The sin of hybris always
makes the sinner prone to fall a victim to an egocentric illusion which is
the intellectual corollary of Original Sin, 1 and in the Weltanschauung of
a student of History this egocentric illusion is apt to conspire with the
misconception of growth as a movement in a straight line 2 to produce a
thorough-going misinterpretation of the history of Mankind.

This had proved to be the penalty that a ‘European’ must pay for the
folly of deifying his own continent to the disparagement of the rest of
the World; and the consequences of this ‘European’ folly were mani¬
festly more serious for a post-Christian Frenchman or Englishman than
for a pre-Christian Athenian or Peloponnesian; for the European Greeks
who allowed themselves to feel superior to their Asiatic Greek contem¬
poraries in the fifth century b.c. were at any rate free from that fanatical
Judaic hallucination of being a ‘chosen people’ which, in the twentieth
century of the Christian Era, insidiously haunted and misinspired the
secular-minded heirs of a once Christian Western tradition. In adopting
the name ‘Europe’ as a substitute for Western Christendom, the Modern
Western World had replaced a misnomer that was merely an anachro¬
nism by a misnomer that was seriously misleading.

could have been executed in two steps. In the first place the Hellenic Civilization could
have been called ‘Asiatic’ without departing farther from the truth than the departure
made by Aeschylus and Herodotus and their Modem Western followers when they
labelled as ‘European’ a civilization that bestrode both continents. In the second place
the mantle of Hellenism could have been declared to have fallen upon the shoulders of
Orthodox Christendom without doing any greater violence to the facts of history than
was done by Westerners who claimed that the West was Hellas’ sole heir, when the truth
was that the two sister Hellenistic civilizations of Western and Eastern Orthodox
Christendom were both equally entitled to claim heirship to the Hellenic heritage. This
counter-Western inversion of a Western misinterpretation of history would have led
straight to the conclusion that there was an ‘Asiatic Civilization’ which was tantamount
to ‘Civilization’ with a capital 'C\

1 This egocentric illusion has been examined in I. i. 157-64.

* Sec I.i. 168-71.

IX. D (ii), ANNEX ■

THE MERCENARY SOLDIER’S ROLE AS A
CULTURAL SPEARHEAD

If an assaulted society succumbs to Human Nature’s instinctive irra¬
tional abhorrence of anything that is alien and unfamiliar when the
challenge takes the form of an encounter with a militarily superior
neighbour, the consequences of this instinctive reaction sometimes illus¬
trate the truth that to yield to the promptings of fear is apt to be the
most dangerous of all possible alternative courses.

The at first sight apparently most non-committal way for an assaulted
society to enlist in its own defence its assailant’s military technique is,
not the hard course of acquiring, handling, and eventually manufacturing
for itself the weapons and equipment, and mastering the drill, tactics,
strategy, and military organization, that are the secrets of the assailant’s
military superiority, but the facile expedient of simply hiring repre¬
sentatives of this militarily superior impinging society to wield their own
exotic weapons, execute their own exotic tactics and strategy, and apply
their own exotic organization as mercenary soldiers, officers, and adminis¬
trators in the assaulted society’s service. In other contexts' we have
observed how civilizations embodied in universal states have delivered
themselves into the hands of the transfronticr barbarians when they have
followed the clever-seeming device of setting a thief to catch a thief by
recruiting barbarian mercenary troops to defend the times against the
barbarian war-bands that are assailing it. Civilizations have also brought
the same fate on themselves by the still more hazardous manauvre of
enlisting the military services of militarily superior neighbours when
these neighbours have been, not barbarians, but representatives of a
society of the employer-society’s own species.

Instances in which the enlistment of mercenary' troops from the ranks
of a militarily superior alien civilization has paved the way for the estab¬
lishment of this alien civilization’s domination over the society that has
thus with its own hands introduced a Trojan Horse into its precincts arc
the enlistment of Hellenic mercenary troops by the Achaemenian Im¬
perial Government during the hundred years ending in Alexander’s
passage of the Dardanelles in 334 b.c. 2 and the enlistment of Toltec
mercenaries to fight the fratricidal battles of the city-states of Yucatan
in the last chapter of Yucatec history' before the forcible incorporation
of the Yucatec Civilization into the Mexic—if this is the correct recon¬
struction of that chapter of Central American history . 3 The enlistment
of Norman and other Western Christian mercenaries by the East Roman
Imperial Government during the 150 years ending in the overthrow of
the East Roman Empire by so-called ‘Crusaders’ in a.d. 1204 likewise
prepared the way for this eventual disaster—and in this case the ulti¬
mately disastrous consequence of employing mercenaries recruited from

* See V. v. 159-69; VI. vii. 329-38; and pp. 41-44, above.

* See VI. vii. 328-9. 1 See I. i. 123-4.

THE MERCENARY AS CULTURAL SPEARHEAD 73*
a society in process of civilization is the more remarkable, considering
that the East Roman Empire—like the Carthaginian Empire in its day—
had been singularly successful in eluding the similar disaster which it
had courted by enlisting the services of all manner of barbarians, ranging
from the horse-archers of the Eurasian Steppe to the Scandinavian and
English axe-men who manned the Varangian Imperial Guard.

This political risk to which a civilization exposes itself in giving mili¬
tary employment to members of an alien society of its own species is not
eliminated when the employer-society abstains from enlisting an alien
rank-and-file and confines itself to commissioning alien officers to take
command of native troops. The handful of Western soldiers of fortune
who were employed in this capacity by the governments of the native
Indian successor-states of the Mughal Raj in India during the hundred
years ending in the final overthrow of the Sikh Power by British arms in
a . d . 1849 wcrc forerunners of an alien universal state of Western origin
in the shape of the British Raj. 1 This Indian experience indicates that
alien military officers cannot be employed with impunity unless their
function is restricted—as it was in Petrine Russia and in the Ottoman
Empire under the regime inaugurated by Selim III and Mahmud II—
to providing an alien leaven for a corps of officers in which the personnel
is still recruited in the main from native sources even after the reception
of an alien military technique and alien art of war.

One of the lines along which the private Western military adventurers
in a post-Mughal India blazed a trail for the British East India Company,
and eventually for the British Crown, was their practice of undertaking
the organization as well as the command of the armies of the Mughal
Raj’s successor-states, insisting on their employers’ assigning to them
portions of their land revenues to finance this new-model military
organization, and finally taking over the administration of the districts
producing these revenues in order to ensure the collection of their dues.
This was the method by which the East India Company succeeded in
swiftly transforming its own relation with one local Indian state after
another from a casual and temporary military alliance into a political
control which was apt to grow progressively more effective until at last
it became indistinguishable from a plenary sovereignty.

‘The system soon reached the stage when the native ally was required
to supply not men but money, and the English undertook to raise, train,
and pay a fixed number of troops on receiving a subsidy equivalent to
their cost. . . . Large sums had hitherto been spent by the native princes
in maintaining ill-managed and insubordinate bodies of troops, and in
constant wars against each other; they might economise their revenues,
be rid of a mutinous soldiery, and sit much more quietly at home, by
entering into contracts with a skilful and solvent administration that would
undertake all serious military business for a fixed subsidy. But, as punc¬
tuality in money matters has never been a princely quality, this subsidy
was apt to be paid very irregularly; so the next stage was to revive the

1 See Compton, H.: A Particular Account of the European Military Adventurers of
Hindustan from 1784 to 1803 (London 1892, Fisher Unwin) and Grey, C., and Garrett,
H. L. O.: European Adventurers in Northern India, 1783-1849 (Lahore 1929, Punjab
Government Press).

732 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES

long-standing practice of Asiatic governments: the assignment of lands for
the payment of troops. . . .

‘The Oudh Vizier was a weak ruler whose country was in confusion,
whose troops were mutinous, and whose finances were disordered by the
heavy strain of the English subsidy. In these circumstances Lord Wellesley
required the Vizier to disband his disorderly forces in order that more
British troops might be subsidized for the effective defence of his domi¬
nions. . . . The Vizier ceded all his frontier provinces, including Rohil-
cund, to the Company, the revenue of the territory thus transferred being
taken as an equivalent to the subsidy payable for troops. . . . And Oudh
was thenceforward enveloped by the English dominion. This most im¬
portant augmentation of territory transferred to the British Government
some of the richest and most populous districts in the heart of India.’ 1

' Lv*U, Sir A.: The Rise and Expansion oj the British Dominion in India (London
1894. John Murray), pp. 245-7.

TABLE OF BARBARIAN WAR-BANDS

Barbarian War-Bands

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